A couple of quotations from my web reading recently: “I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, waterboarding is torture.” –U.S. Attorney General nominee Eric Holder (via) “Watch half a film. Ring someone up, ask them about their dreams. Make your life as patchy a discourse as possible.” —M. John Harrison, explaining something about writing “If only it were all so simple!… Read more →
Tag: thinking
Language By Example
I like to think I have a pretty large vocabulary, and more than that I kind of pride myself on understanding why words mean what they do–what the history behind them is. Even so, there are lots of times I find myself using a word or phrase in a way that I’ve heard it used before, often many times before,… Read more →
Everything(*) You Know Is Wrong
How fast does the average electron move through a copper wire? If you thought “at the speed of light” or “something close to the speed of light, but varying with the conduction medium” you are so wrong that’s it’s almost immeasurable. What’s the temperature in a complete vacuum? If you answered “near absolute zero” or “very cold”, then you might… Read more →
Aside
Today’s recursion giggle: a concept map of concept maps.
Web Crack For Intellectuals
Wikipedia is one of the best things humanity has yet invented for allowing us to use up any extra time we have hanging around. As an added bonus, this time comes with a putative “educational value” benefit, which makes it easy to justify the time and avoid guilt over it. One example of how this might happen: you could go… Read more →
A short break from politics
And now, a few observations about things completely unrelated to either North American election: That Wisdom book showed up today. Totally worth the money. It’s been a long time since I bought a “coffee table book”, but if I had a coffee table I’d be proud to leave this out on it. You know where I’m find more interesting reading… Read more →
Screen Reading
“The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away… Read more →
I Just Don’t Get It.
In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear to me that I… Read more →
Chris Jordan On TED
I’m still loving almost every one of the TED Talks, but every now and then one pops up and really grabs me by the collar. Here’s the one that really hit me this week. This is a presentation by photographer Chris Jordan, where he presents some of the images from his exhibition, Running The Numbers. (At the link you can… Read more →
SF Writers Say Smart Things: Cory Doctorow on statistics and security
I often use the same example Cory uses here in discussing security issues at work: 99% effective means 10,000 failures over a million instances. Which in turn means that if you’re trying to detect a 1-in-a-million event, then you will get it 9999 false positives for every real event you detect–and at that rate, you will never find the actual… Read more →
What You Need To Know
I have been insanely busy and travelling all week. This will continue tomorrow, hopefully reaching a peak so that things will mellow out a bit into the weekend. The remainder of this post is for the gentleman who, when challenged by me today asked me with a straight face “You don’t need proof that 1+1=2, do you?” For those of… Read more →
Seriously, who would simulate me?
From time to time I run across something that just shocks me, not because of the thing itself, but because the thing is so completely something I should have known about and yet have somehow missed. How does a philosophy argument about things that interest me greatly go on for years without my hearing about it? Today’s example of this… Read more →
QOTD
“The threat to men of great dignity, privilege and pretense is not from the radicals they revile; it is from accepting their own myth. Exposure to reality remains the nemesis of the great — a little understood thing.” —John Kenneth Galbraith Read more →
A Guide To Grown-up Thinking
I read a lot of magazines–oddly more offline than on. I think this is because my online reading tends to be wide-ranging, shallow, and driven by references from other sources–there are few “online magazines” that I find myself reading “cover to cover”, as it were. Interesting magazines tend to be composed of pieces that are longer, more indepth, and thus… Read more →
Quote Of The Day
“People who have to apply rules like them because they eliminate the need to exercise judgment.” –Ernie The Attorney He goes on to suggest that some people don’t want to have to defend a judgment, but I suspect there are a really large number of people who are too lazy to get that far: they just don’t want to have… Read more →
