27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Redundancy of English language is a Goldilocks zone for C...
In Shannon’s terms, the feature of messages that makes codecracking possible is redundancy. A historian of cryptography, David Kahn, explained it like this: “Roughly, redundancy means that more symbols are transmitted in a message than are actually needed to bear the information.” Information resolves our uncertainty; redundancy is every part of a message that tells us nothing new. Whenever we can guess what comes next, we’re in the presence of redundancy. Letters can be redundant: be... 1 
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notes23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Why Do We Like Certain Tunes or Understand Certain Senten...
Contrast two answers to the question, Why do we like certain tunes?
Because they have certain structural features.Because they resemble other tunes we like.
The first answer has to do with the laws and rules that make tunes pleasant. In language, we know some laws for sentences; that is, we know the forms sentences must have to be syntactically acceptable, if not the things they must have to make them sensible or even pleasant to the ear. As to melody, it seems that we only know som... 1 notes
notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Diversification in the Cosmos
The last of the five philosophical problems is the problem of final aims. The problem here is to try to formulate some {298} statement of the ultimate purpose of the universe. In other words, the problem is to read God's mind. Previous attempts to read God's mind have not been notably successful. One of the more penetrating of such attempts is recorded in the Book of Job. God's answer to Job out of the whirlwind was not encouraging. Nevertheless I stand in good company when I ask again the ... 1 notes
notes01 SEP 2014 by ideonexus
Literature Asks Questions without Offering Answers
Even when writers profess to know nothing about the inner man, they often make the profession in a way which suggests that they really know plenty When D. H. Lawrence says (in his essay on Benjamin Franklin) "The soul of man is a dark forest," he says it with a kind of knowing Satanic smirk, so that the profession of ignorance actually becomes a species of knowledge. When I first read that ominous Lawrence sentence I was young and it was news to me that my soul was a dark forest. For several ... 1 notes
notes09 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Survey, Question, Read, Recite, and Review (SQR3)
Survey
The first step, survey or skim, advises that one should resist the temptation to read the book and instead glance through a chapter in order to identify headings, sub-headings and other outstanding features in the text. This is in order to identify ideas and formulate questions about the content of the chapter.
Question
Formulate questions about the content of the reading. For example, convert headings and sub-headings into questions, and then look for answers in the content of the ...Folksonomies: education
Folksonomies: education
1 notes
notes30 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Look for What Makes You Different
“Some of you think your hand in life is all deuces and treys.” At the front of the room were some really dedicated students, not much older than Juan. They were wearing, but they had no clothes sense and had never learned ensemble coding. As Chumlig spoke, you could see their fingers tapping away, searching on “deuces” and “treys.” “But I have a theory of life,” said Chumlig, “and it is straight out of gaming: There is always an angle. You, each of you, have some special wil... 1 notes
notesFictional scene from a future where IT is much more advanced.
07 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Imagining the Primitive Mind
AND now let us indulge in a very interesting speculation; how did it feel to be a man in those early days of the human adventure? How did men think and what did they think in those remote days of hunting and wandering four hundred centuries ago before seed time and harvest began. Those were days long before the written record of any human impressions, and we are left almost entirely to inference and guesswork in our answers to these questions.
[...]
Primitive man probably thought very much ... 1 notes
notesAs evolution tends to build in lairs, the primitive mind must have been much like that of a child.
03 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
énouement
n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, where you can finally get the answers to how things turn out in the real world—who your baby sister would become, what your friends would end up doing, where your choices would lead you, exactly when you’d lose the people you took for granted—which is priceless intel that you instinctively want to share with anybody who hadn’t already made the journey, as if there was some part of you who had volunteered to stay behind, who ... 1 notes
notesA poetic way to describe the desire to know in the past what we know now.
06 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
There's No Such Thing as a "One-Handed Scientist"
The rub, of course, is that everybody else thinks that science should provide the answers. Remember the Concorde? Back in the early 1970s, Congress was debating supersonic transport, trying to decide whether such aircraft would represent a danger when flown over the United States. Would their big engines flying high in the sky cut a hole in the ozone and let in solar radiation? Would the plane make sonic booms as it flew over people’s neighborhoods? And so on.
Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME) ... 1 notes
notesScientists must consider all the evidence and factor nuance into their positions. This is illustrated with an interesting historical anecdote about a Congressional review concerning the safety of the Concord jet.
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Teaching a Child About Death
My dad used to take naps next to my daughter on the bed and I remember seeing them in there—my father with his oxygen machine and my daughter curled up next to him—and it was all so dreamy and loving and cute. And so, it was a big deal when he died. And my daughter had questions.
When she asked “What happens after we die?” I said, “To be honest, darling—we decompose.” And she wanted to know what that meant. A bird had died in our backyard and so we watched how it disappeared a ... 1 notes
notesJulia Sweeney describes how she taught her daughter about death after her grandfather died.
