“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln *

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[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

(…)

“When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the ‘error’ is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation.”

And a scholar at the Hoover Institution performed an experiment with totally unsurprising results: When 100 terms from U.S. history books were entered into Google, the topics’ Wikipedia articles were the first hits 87 times.

All of these examples are signs of the times.

And all of them get at a big question: For the Google generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and knowledge in a user-generated world of information saturation?

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { lastnightsparty }

French philosopher Clément Rosset said that most scientists, philosophers, mathematicians, or any intellectual who spends his time thinking, are actually people trying to deal with their angst, to divert their mind from an angst whirlpool, because they couldn’t deal with it otherwise (certainly at a subconscious level). They create theorems or philosophic systems to answer questions like “why are we on planet earth?” or “what is death?” to actually screen out the fact that there’s no answer. It’s a fear-driven process, said Rosset, to think/overthink is healing our fear of angst. Then Rosset said that there’s a theory that dolphins have never been affraid of anything, they had no predators and knew where to find food, etc. They were very intelligent, but as they had no fear, no angst, they didn’t need to make up theories about what’s what to develop their intelligence. Maybe if they did, they’d be smarter than human beings.

Intellectuals aren’t the only ones who fear reality as it is. moralizers and religious people do too. They’re actually worse because they invent other worlds, like heaven, and build lies that makes no sense at all like at the top of the list: the purpose of your life is to live a shitty existence (try to have babies without orgasms, etc). They can’t stand the tragic nature of reality, the angst, the obvious fact that we’re here for no reason, that there’s no after-world, no god, that a big percentage of the population, anywhere, anytime, is evil, or stupid, or both, that death is the final frontier, that in billions of years all of this we call the world and its history, will be dust engulfed by the sun, etc). I mean, things are what they are, get over it.

{ stereohell }

photo { Skye Parrott, Tali, New York, 2007 | via the exciting new Dossier }

Polyhex — An analog of the polyominoes and polyiamonds in which collections of regular hexagons are arranged with adjacent sides. They are also called hexes, hexas, or polyfrobs.

For the 4-hexes (tetrahexes), the possible arrangements are known as the bee, bar, pistol, propeller, worm, arch, and wave.

{ Wolfram | Continue reading }

The New York Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It’s all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn’t write when she was experiencing one of her “episodes”: the onset of depression was “like a death,” she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf’s journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here is I how describe Woolf in my book:

Woolf’s writing style was deeply rooted in her own experience of the brain. She was mentally ill. All her life, she suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns, those horrible moments when her depression became suffocating. As a result, Woolf lived in fear of her own mind, exquisitely sensitive to its fevered “vibrations.” Introspection was her only medicine. “My own psychology interests me,” she confessed to her journal. “I intend to keep full notes of my ups and downs for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain and shame become at once much less. (…)

Woolf never recovered. Her constant state of reflection, her wariness for hints of the return of her devastating depression, left an indelible scar on her writing. “Nerves” is one of her favorite words. Its medical varieties–neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, neuroasthenic–continually enter her prose, their sharp, scientific pang contradicting the suppleness of her character’s internal soliloquies. In Woolf’s diary, notes on form were always interwoven with comments on headaches.

In other words, Woolf’s mental illness forced her to think about her mind, which fueled her modernist writing style. But the illness itself was an obstacle: she wrote in spite of it, not because of it.

That said, there are some interesting connections between schizotypal individuals - schizotypy is a mental condition that resembles schizophrenia, albeit with far less severe symptoms - and creativity, at least as measured in the psychology lab.

{ Jonah Lehrer/ScienceBlogs | Continue reading }

photo { Jackson Eaton }

People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.

Researchers have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.

{ ScienceDaily | Continue reading }

Sitting in the study hall he opened the lid of his desk and changed the number pasted up inside from seventy-seven to seventy-six. But the Christmas vacation was very far away: but one time it would come because the earth moved round always.

There was a picture of the earth on the first page of his geography: a big ball in the middle of clouds. (…)

He opened the geography to study the lesson; but he could not learn the names of places in America. Still they were all different places that had different names. They were all in different countries and the countries were in continents and the continents were in the world and the world was in the universe.

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written there: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus
Class of Elements
Clongowes Wood College
Sallins
County Kildare
Ireland
Europe
The World
The Universe

{ James Joyce, A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, 1916 | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Formless, 1982-1983 | acrylic, oil paintstick, crayon, graphite, colored pencil, and charcoal on paper }

Think too hard about it, and mathematics starts to seem like a mighty queer business. For example, are new mathematical truths discovered or invented? Seems like a simple enough question, but for millennia, it has provided fodder for arguments among mathematicians and philosophers.

Those who espouse discovery note that mathematical statements are true or false regardless of personal beliefs, suggesting that they have some external reality. But this leads to some odd notions. Where, exactly, do these mathematical truths exist? Can a mathematical truth really exist before anyone has ever imagined it?

On the other hand, if math is invented, then why can’t a mathematician legitimately invent that 2 + 2 = 5? (…)

Plato is the standard-bearer for the believers in discovery. The Platonic notion is that mathematics is the imperturbable structure that underlies the very architecture of the universe. By following the internal logic of mathematics, a mathematician discovers timeless truths independent of human observation and free of the transient nature of physical reality. (…)
If the mathematical ideas are out there, waiting to be found, then somehow a purely abstract notion has to have existence even when no human being has ever conceived of it. (…) Brian Davies, a mathematician at King’s College London, writes that Platonism “has more in common with mystical religions than with modern science.” And modern science, he believes, provides evidence to show that the Platonic view is just plain wrong. He titled his article “Let Platonism Die.”

Davies argues that brain-imaging studies are making this belief steadily less plausible. He points out that our brains integrate many different aspects of visual perception with memory and preconceptions to create a single image — not always correctly, as optical illusions make clear. He also says that brain-imaging studies are beginning to show the biological basis of our numeric sense.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

illustration { Damien Hirst, The Holy Trinity, 2005 }

Just how good would drug legalization be? (…)

Under one model, local gangs have a more or less fixed ability to terrorize a neighborhood. Even if everything is legalized, the gangs will continue local monopolies to maximize tribute, subject of course to constraints from other gangs and the police. In this model, legalizing drugs doesn’t do much good. The local gang either shifts its monopoly to another area (milk and sugar, if need be), or de facto the gang’s local monopoly on the drug trade continues. The gang busts you if you try to get your supply of crack cocaine from Merck.

Under a second model, the ability of a local gang to monopolize and terrorize depends on the availability of drug trade revenue. Take away illegal drugs and the gang collapses — Merck outcompetes them — and the neighborhood revitalizes.

Libertarian arguments for legalization typically envision the second model rather than the first. I expect something in between. So I don’t favor the War on Drugs but I believe the benefits from stopping that war are often exaggerated. Note that whether the first or second scenario holds may depend on just how easy drugs are to get legally.

One claim was that current drug suppliers don’t reap huge rents, so legalizing drugs won’t much discourage them.

{ Marginal Revolution }

In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language affects thought.

The hypothesis postulates that language influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.

{ Sapir–Whorf hypothesis | Wikipedia }

Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.

The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.

Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.

The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.

When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.

The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.

In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?

The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. (…)

Language also has a significant role in seeing and remembering where objects are in space. Dr. Dedre Gentner at Northwestern and her colleagues conducted experiments on the spatial reasoning of hearing children and children who “home-sign.”

Home-signers have hearing parents, but they are congenitally deaf and have never been taught a sign language. The gestural language they develop is invented solely by themselves. (…)

The children were shown two side-by-side boxes. Internally, each box was divided in three. In each space was a card.

During each trial, the experimenter took a card from the first box and showed the child that it had a special star on the back. Replacing it in the first box in the same space, the experimenter asked the child to find where the special card would be in the second box. Essentially, the children were asked to map the position of the target card in the first box to the same position in the second.

The researchers found that children without words for spatial relationships, whether young or home-signers, had much more trouble finding the special card in the second box than older hearing children who had learned the relevant words.

For young hearing children, exposure to spatial language in the experiment strongly influenced the success rate. If the experimenter used spatial terms when speaking to a child, saying, “I’m putting the card in the top” (or “middle” or “bottom”), as opposed to, “I’m putting the card here,” the children were much likelier to find the correct spot in the second box.

The effect lasted not just through the experiment, but until at least two days later, when the children were retested.

“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Rominita }

photo { Jacob Holdt | scanned from United States 1970-1975 }

related { Exact time now: US Naval Observatory Master Clock Time }

A year contains 365.242199 days. That’s why we have leap years, to compensate for the extra 0.242199 days.

Prior to 1582, the year was approximated as 365.25 days (instead of 365.242199). And every year divisible by 4 was a leap year. Big mistake! said Pope Gregory XIII. Because 365.25 days per year is not 365.242199 days per year… it gives an error of 1 day in approximately 128 years…

So in 1582, the Pope and his mob noticed that an error of ten days had accumulated over the centuries.

To make up for this error, Pope Gregory XIII decreed that that year the ten days between October 5 and October 14, 1582 would be removed from the calendar.

Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, adopted the reform when Pope Gregory proclaimed it (and skipped from October 4 to October 15). France skipped from December 9, 1582 to December 20, 1582, Denmark and Flanders skipped from December 25, 1582 to January 5, 1583.

The Church of England waited almost two centuries before considering changing the calendar. The British Empire (Great Britain and American Colonies) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752, by skipping from September 2 to September 14 (by that time, 11 days had to be added).

Correcting for the extra 0.242199 days each year requires 96.8796 days (400 x 0.242199) every 400 years. The Gregorian Calendar provides for a correction of 97 days (97 leap years) every 400 years. After 1582, years divisible by 100 are not leap years unless they are also divisible by 400. Thus, 1900 is not a leap year, but 2000 is.

{ About the Gregorian Calendar | The Gregorian Conversion | Calendar for September 1752 }

While traveling late last night, from MIT to Cornell for entrepreneurship events, the radio station in the car seemed to get caught between two different FM transmissions from two neighboring cities. With a crackling of static, the song I had been listening to was being slowly replaced by a different new song. I liked the new song better, but it faded in and out. So I tuned it in—by stepping on the gas, accelerating towards a conjured image of a bleeping radio tower shooting out lightning bolt waves—just like those old black and white ads just before they say “we interrupt this broadcast…”
 
My point is this: new and persuasive ideas can take hold of you just as that song did. They draw you in and make you accelerate towards the people originating the signal—and away from some old idea you held. For some short period of time, the two ideas might intersect, amplify or cancel each other, leaving you confused, despite F. Scott Fitzgerald’s claim that the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Eventually old ideas like old songs get replaced by new ones.
 
And remember all new ideas are just combinations (usually with mutations) of old ideas, just as all new molecules are different combinations of atoms pulled from the periodic table of elements.
 
Here’s something interesting to consider on the complex interaction of old things. As you increase the number of components you have in a system, the possible ways those components can interact grows even more quickly. Imagine you have two subsystems, let’s call them X and Y. Let’s also say each is made up of 5 parts. If you only consider two-way interaction between the parts, there are 55 determinants. (Here’s the math; 5 X-parts, 5 Y-parts, 10 interactions between the X-parts, 10 interactions between the Y-parts and 25 interactions between X-parts and Y-parts).
 
Now consider this: Only 18% (10 out of 55) of the determinants of the system come from the individual effects of parts in X and Y while 82% (45 out of 55) come from their interactions. Remember: this is a system with only two subsystems each with 5 parts. Now imagine having a system where two subsystems X and Y are each made up of 100 parts. Now 99% of what happens occurs because of the interactions between the parts. Here’s the math: (100 X-parts, 100 y-parts, 4,950 interactions of X-parts, 4,950 interactions of Y-parts and 10,000 interactions between X-parts and Y-parts)–and the credulity of those who flock. Remember, eventually flocks get fleeced.
 
Think about this: this is a mildly complex system with only 100 variables and already the individual inputs are less relevant than the output of their interactions! Now remember this when you scratch your head at even far more complex systems that test the credibility—(of weather forecasters, stocks market pundits and anyone else who lays claim to predict the future of complex systems like weather or markets).

{ Josh Wolfe, Nanotech Weekly Insider Newsletter | Apr. 10, 2008 }