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The study of mathematical uncertainty is called probability. According to Richard Epstein, "The word 'probability' stems from the Latin probabilis, meaning 'truth-resembling'; thus the word itself literally invites semantic misinterpretation." [1]What Epstein means by "semantic misinterpretation" is that if something…
Emergence is above all a product of coupled, context-dependent interactions. Technically these interactions, and the resulting system, are nonlinear: The behavior of the overall system cannot be obtained by summing the behaviors of its constituent parts. We can no more truly understand strategies in a board game by…
On the far left are fixed systems that remain unchanging.hand, a screen that is full of random static would be completely The relationships between their elements are always the chaotic, with the color of a dot at one moment having nothing same. The black, unchanging TV screen is a good image for this kind of system…
What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern…
A few of my favorites, not found in the linked article: "There are two ways of constructing software. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. The other is to make it so complex that there are no obvious deficiencies." C.A.R. Hoare "The purpose of software engineering is to control…
Your steps should be in a cycle: short, long, long. Long in this case means a double step. Thus, you will cover five stairs in one short-long-long cycle. In addition, you should always start the first cycle on the same foot. Suppose you start on the left foot, then after two cycles you are back on the left foot…
...people who engage in “work-related prospection”– that is, thinking and planning about the day and week ahead and the steps you need to take to achieve your career goals – tend to weather the stresses of the journey better than people whose minds wander aimlessly. This translated to greater job satisfaction…
Built in 1858, the house was constructed for Ellen Dwight, a great-granddaughter of a genius tinkerer of an earlier era, Thomas Jefferson. Originally seated on twelve acres, its design was inspired by Monticello. Encircled by “a three-sided verandah with segmental openings and chamfered posts,” the house was a stately…
Whenever we communicate, rules everywhere restrict our freedom to choose the next letter and the next pineapple.I Because these rules render certain patterns more likely and certain patterns almost impossible, languages like English come well short of complete uncertainty and maximal information: the sequence “th” has…
The psychologist shut his eyes and scratched his nose. “This is the most incredible example of sensual hallucination and hypnotic suggestion I’ve ever encountered. I went through your «rocket,» as you call it.” He tapped the hull. “I hear it. Auditory fantasy.” He drew a breath. “I smell it. Olfactory hallucination…
The four Mertonian norms (often abbreviated as the CUDOS-norms) can be summarised as: communalism: all scientists should have common ownership of scientific goods (intellectual property), to promote collective collaboration; secrecy is the opposite of this norm. universalism: scientific validity is independent of the…
Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be…
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…
...where does probability theory come from? What is its source? Clearly, like many other sciences, like arithmetic itself, probability theory emerged from observations of certain real-world phenomena, namely, random, unpredictable phenomena. And it is exactly these kinds of observations—fundamental to the formation of…
Colozza on Play Phenomena.—The psychology and pedagogy of play form the subjects of a recent volume by Professor G. A. Colozza, whose views may be thus summarised: Play is the superfluity of energy over and above the essential needs of life,—at once the equivalent of accumulated energy and the means of its…
Gutsmuths.—Many of the ideas in PHome are better expressed, though independently arrived at, in the remarkable volume on play, published by Gutsmuths, ‘the father of play in Germany,’ towards the end of the eighteenth century. Gutsmuths recognised the universality of play among all ages and all peoples, the infinite…
To begin with, the findings of science imply that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the genesis of the world, life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that…
At the time when the lines begin, in the mid-18th century, life expectancy in Europe and the Americas was around 35, where it had been parked for the 225 previous years for which we have data.3 Life expectancy for the world as a whole was 29. These numbers are in the range of expected life spans for most of human…
How is entropy relevant to human affairs? Life and happiness depend on an infinitesimal sliver of orderly arrangements of matter amid the astronomical number of possibilities. Our bodies are improbable assemblies of molecules, and they maintain that order with the help of other improbabilities: the few substances that…
The ideals of the Enlightenment are products of human reason, but they always struggle with other strands of human nature: loyalty to tribe, deference to authority, magical thinking, the blaming of misfortune on evildoers. The second decade of the 21st century has seen the rise of political movements that depict their…