21 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
Essays Should Not Need to Argue a Point
The Age of the Essay
September 2004
Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure.
Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one.
Mods
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real ess... 1 
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notes13 NOV 2015 by ideonexus
Technology Enables IA, but Culture Must Evolve for It
Look at what intellect would be without writing or the printing press—these primitive technologies already make such a difference. Just think of what the latest computer technology will be able to do to further augment the intellect!
But this is a non-sequitur: what makes writing and paper powerful is technology to some extent, but it is mostly the rich culture that grew up around it.
Let’s look at writing first. The earlies extant samples of writing are Babylonian clay tablets contai... 1 notes
notes31 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Aristotle Was About Quantity, Not Quality, of Thought
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought more in actual footage during his life than any other person ever thought in the same elapsed time of sixty-two years. I do say, however, that any prize he deserves for so doing should be for quantity, not quality, as a great deal of it was spinach. He would sit around and think like one possessed, or he would walk around and think, since he was a Peripatetic, as they called it in those days. And then he would announce that Swallows spend the winter under ... 1 notes
notes09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
König’s paradox: Ordinals
Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.
[...]
To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise,...Folksonomies: mathematics paradox
Folksonomies: mathematics paradox
1 notes
notesAlso Betrand Russel's "Set of All Sets that Do Not Contain Themselves"
30 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Bottom-Up VS Top-Down Method for Finding Laws
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically expressible form to connect the two. Components are weaved into a mental map and experiments are planned to verify or nullify the model. If the experimental observations r... 1 notes
notesFascinating explanation for why laws are harder and harder to find as we move into macroscopic sciences.
29 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Man, Universe-Builder and Maker of Over-Beliefs
Every man is a "Universe-Builder"; he is, likewise, a maker of "Over-beliefs".
Man's inner and outer necessities, real or imagined, have made him both a Scientist and a Philosopher. Neither Science nor Philosophy alone has been adequate. The material facts of the science of his universe have not satisfied; an "overbelief" or a "philosophy" in terms of which an interpretation of his life as a whole may be attempted has been a necessity. He has been in search not only of facts but of meaning ... 1 notes
notesIntroduction to a 1930's science book. The language is very interesting. The passage is very insightful in places, naive in others, but poetic throughout.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Gedankenexperiment
However, the subject need not be an esoteric one for a gedankenexperiment to be fruitful. My own favorite is Galileo’s proof that, contrary to Aristotle’s view, objects of different mass fall in a vacuum with the same acceleration. One might think that a real experiment needs to be conducted to test that hypothesis, but Galileo simply asked us to consider a large and a small stone tied together by a very light string. If Aristotle was right, the large stone should speed up the smaller one...Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
Folksonomies: thought experiment testability
1 Gino Segre on the importance and validity of "thought-experiments," using Galileo's disproof of objects falling at different rates as an example.
13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Galileo and the Altar Lamp Pendulum
IN 1583 Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), a youth of nineteen attending prayers in the baptistery of the Cathedral of Pisa, was, according to tradition, distracted by the swinging of the altar lamp. No matter how wide the swing of the lamp, it seemed that the time it took the lamp to move from one end to the other was the same. Of course Galileo had no watch, but he checked the intervals of the swing by his own pulse. This curious everyday puzzle, he said, enticed him away from the study of medi... 1 notes
notesThe puzzle and the pendulum time piece.
13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Clock, Icon of Science
Philosophers were always looking for new handles on the universe—new
similes, new metaphors, new analogies. Despite their scorn for those who
cast the Creator of the Universe in man's image, the theologians never
ceased to scrutinize man's own handiwork as their clues to God. Now man
was a proud clockmaker, a maker of self-moving machines. Once set in
motion, the mechanical clock seemed to tick with a life of its own. Might
not the universe itself be a vast clock made and set in motion by t... 1 notes
notesThe first icon to replace religous icons in Western culture.
13 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Glory of the Library of Alexandria
Alexander had already devoted considerable sums to finance the enquiries of Aristotle, but Ptolemy I was the first person to make a permanent endowment of science. He set up a foundation in Alexandria which was formerly dedicated to the Muses, the Museum {151}of Alexandria. For two or three generations the scientific work done at Alexandria was extraordinarily good. Euclid, Eratosthenes who measured the size of the earth and came within fifty miles of its true diameter, Apollonius who wrote o... 1 notes
notesThe star scientists and inventions that came out of it's first century.
