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Have you ever played Akinator? You think of a character, a genie asks you some twenty questions, and somehow it knows. That’s fingerprinting in a nutshell, except your browser answers the questions for you. Once you understand information entropy, Akinator’s magic turns into a simple trick. Let’s simplify with that…
The most striking case of technological regress is Tasmania. Isolated on an island at the end of the world, a population of less than 5,000 hunter-gatherers divided into nine tribes did not just stagnate, or fail to progress. They fell steadily and gradually back into a simpler toolkit and lifestyle, purely because…
Broadly speaking, those who advocate for game-based education seek to find ways to integrate specific, preexisting games directly into the curriculum. They want to use games to illustrate specific points or develop specific skills that they believe are uniquely developed by the game in question (Prensky, 2001). There…
“Right now, I’m a little thirsty, so I will drink a bit of water. And when I do that, I experience a thin slice of joy both in space and time,” he told CBC News. “It’s not like ‘Yay!”” he notes in Joy on Demand. “It’s like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of nice.’” Usually these events are unremarkable: a bite of food, the sensation…
Inequality of information- find a place where you know something that many undervalue. Having this inequality of information can give you, your first piece of leverage. Be an unrelenting machine- Brick walls are there to show you how bad you want something. Commit to your goals and do not waver from them a one bit…
One may picture, then, these beings, nuclearly resident, so to speak, in a relatively small set of mental units, each utilizing the bare minimum of energy, connected together by a complex of etherial intercommunication, and spreading themselves over immense areas and periods of time by means of inert sense organs…
Sometimes in an upper-level class I’ll assign a problem I don’t expect students to solve. It either involves some subtle trick, or requires theoretical techniques they haven’t yet learned. I assign them because I want students to struggle a bit with problems for which the solutions aren’t clear. “Wander into the…
I have been a bit negative about memes, but they have their cheerful side as well. When we die there are two things we can leave behind us: genes and memes. We were built as gene machines, created to pass on our genes. But that aspect of us will be forgotten in three generations. Your child, even your grandchild, may…
The first thing you'll notice about Real-life is that it about 9 months to start a new character, mainly because two other players have to "register" for a new player to enter the game, fortunately now-a-days "registering" is happening more and more frequently, unfortunately this means that the "sever" getting…
The Chinese characters say 加油 (Jia1 you2). 加 is composed of 力 (power) and 口 (mouth). It means 'to add' 油 is made out of 水 (氵, water) and 由(from/ due). It means oil. 加（to add） 油（oil）= add oil or make an extra effort 加油 is a terribly common phrase in day to day life. If you want to encourage someone to carry on great…
The historians say that we sleepwalked into a surveillance state. They meant that the technology for widespread surveillance progressed and was implemented in a gradual manner, though quick considering the actual time scales, and with little in the way of open discussion about the ramifications, so that before anyone…
Banks may have displayed a lack of anger at his diagnosis, but that does not mean that his righteous ire is extinguished. As we chat, he frequently loops off into hilarious denunciations. "I can understand that people want to feel special and important and so on, but that self-obsession seems a bit pathetic somehow…
“The body tries to stay alive. It’s not so… It’s natural. Maybe you’ll see it now. First the human brain dies, then the animal brain, then the lizard brain. Like your Rm, only backward. The lizard brain tries to its very last bit of energy to keep things going. I’ve seen it. Some kind of desire. It’s a real force…
Behold the mighty dinosaur, Famous in prehistoric lore, Not only for his power and strength But for his intellectual length. You will observe by these remains The creature had two sets of brains— One in his head (the usual place), The other at his spinal base. Thus he could reason 'A priori' As well as 'A posteriori'…
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as part of his duty, the words, 'If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife…
Einstein's equation gives us the most concrete explanation for the central fact that nothing can travel faster than light speed. You may have wondered, for instance, why we can't take some object, a muon say, that an accelerator has boosted up to 667 million miles per hour—99.5 percent of light speed—and "push it a…
Encourage a child to think well, then trust her to do so. Removing religion by no means guarantees kids will think independently and well. Consider religion itself: Kids growing up in a secular home are at the same risk of making uninformed decisions about religion as are those in deeply religious homes. In order to…
One of the greatest metaphors in Western Civilization is that of Christ who gave his life so that others might live, and I don't want to be sacreligious and I don't want to belittle that myth in any way, but a pig is giving its life so that we might eat, a chickent is giving its life so that we might eat, and I think…
Nothing is known in our profession by guess; and I do not believe, that from the first dawn of medical science to the present moment, a single correct idea has ever emanated from conjecture: it is right therefore, that those who are studying their profession should be aware that there is no short road to knowledge…
The idea of an indivisible, ultimate atom is inconceivable by the lay mind. If we can conceive of an idea of the atom at all, we can conceive it as capable of being cut in half; indeed, we cannot conceive it at all unless we so conceive it. The only true atom, the only thing which we cannot subdivide and cut in half…