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Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man, And they in France of the best rank and station Are of a most select and generous chief in that…
There are at least two senses in which the RULES schemas offer a "formal" way of looking at games. First, the term formal is used in the sense of "form": rules constitute the inner form or organization of games. In other words, rules are the inner, essential structures that constitute the real-world objects known as…
The term magic circle is appropriate because there is in fact something genuinely magical that happens when a game begins. A fancy Backgammon set sitting all alone might be a pretty decoration on the coffee table. If this is the function that the game is serving-decoration-it doesn't really matter how the game pieces…
If you know kindergartners, you know that a thread on the carpet can become one of the most fascinating objects on the face of the earth. The child will pick it up and run her fingers the length of it, scrutinizing every centimeter of that thread. She might hold it up in the sunlight to get a better look and then lay…
Now particle physics in the United States is struggling to survive the d isaster of the Supercond ucting Supercollid er. The Supercollid er was a gigantic particle accelerator project that was canceled in 1 993 after about 3 billion d ollars had alread y been spent on it. The cancellation was a personal traged y for…
Felis catus is your taxonomic nomenclature, An endothermic quadruped, carnivorous by nature. Your visual, olfactory, and auditory senses Contribute to your hunting skills and natural defenses. I find myself intrigued by your subvocal oscillations, A singular development of cat communications That obviates your basic…
The ABC model of emotion, widespread in contemporary psychotherapy, holds that it is not an activating (A) event, such as rejection by a friend or lover, that causes you emotional consequences (C) such as depression; rather, the linchpin is your invisible beliefs (B) about the event that come in between A and C…
A story told by this friend, Firminus, shook the young Augustine from his pagan faith. Firminus’ father, an earnest experimenter in astrology, always noted the positions of the stars and even “took care with the most exact diligence to know the birth of his very puppies.” Firminus’ father learned that one of his…
bridi - relationships selbri - the kind of relation sumti - describe the relation bridi are composed of two different units: all bridi must have a selbri and any given amount of sumti Examples: x1 gives x2 to x3 mi dunda ti do do - you mi - me ti - this (as in this thing here in my hands or near me) x1 is a friend of…
Cops, emergency room doctors, and insurance actuarists all know it. They realize how many crazy impossible things happen all the time. A burglar gets stuck in a chimney, a truck driver in a head on collision is thrown out the front window and lands on his feet, walks away; a wild antelope knocks a man off his bike; a…
Neem is a mnemonic drug that works by “tagging” experiences and mental input with a set of unique sensations that contribute to the formation of state-based memories. Neem gummy chews come in a variety of fruit avors shaped like extinct old Earth animals. Neem gives characters a 20 bonus on COG Tests to recall…
Bayes’s much more famous work, “An Essay toward Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances,”24 was not published until after his death, when it was brought to the Royal Society’s attention in 1763 by a friend of his named Richard Price. It concerned how we formulate probabilistic beliefs about the world when we…
Mulan started kindergarten at our local public school. And as part of her day at school, she said the “Pledge of Allegiance.” She proudly repeated it to me, and the “under God” part made me flinch. “You don’t have to say ‘under God’ you know,” I said—and her eyes widened with fear. “What do you mean?” I said, “You can…
Even if there had been no Dataset, even if Johanna Olsndot had not come from the stars, she would still be the most fascinating creature in the world: a pack-equivalent mind in a single body. You could walk right up to her, you could touch her, without the least confusion. It was frightening at first, but all of them…
This refusal to allow anything to chance, ‘accident’ or good fortune was exactly the same as Herschel’s insistence that chance played no part in his discovery of Uranus. Coleridge had taken this up as one of the key philosophical problems associated with science, in an essay provokingly entitled ‘Does Fortune Favour…
Up! up! my friend, and quit your books; Or surely you'll grow double: Up! up! my friend, and clear your looks; Why all this toil and trouble? The sun, above the mountain's head, A freshening lustre mellow, Through all the long green fields has spread, His first sweet evening yellow. Books! 'tis a dull endless strife…
Professor Ayrton said that we were gradually coming within thinkable distance of the realization of a prophecy he had ventured to make four years before, of a time when, if a person wanted to call to a friend he knew not where, he would call in a very loud electromagnetic voice, heard by him who had the…
But where, says some, is the King of America? I'll tell you. Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the…
Three engineers were having lunch one day, and the talk turned philosophical: The first engineer wondered what kind of engineering help God had when He created humankind, and proposed "It must have been a mechanical engineer -- just look at the variety of movements in all the joints of the body!" The second engineer…
I have a friend who's an artist and he's sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree, I think. And he says--"you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a…