02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Consider the Longevity of the Knowledge You Consume
While most of us focus on consuming information that we won’t care about next month, let alone next year, Buffett focused on knowledge and companies that change very, very slowly or not at all. And because the information he was learning changed slowly he could compound his knowledge over time. And as Schroeder notes, Buffett has been in business for a long time, giving him incredible opportunities to create a cumulative base of knowledge.
Expiring information is sexy but it’s not knowle...Folksonomies: mind hacks
Folksonomies: mind hacks
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notes12 DEC 2017 by ideonexus
Feminist Portrayal in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Writing
All day the memory of this interview haunted him. He felt that he had come very badly out of it. She had showed herself to be his superior on his own pet subject. She had been courteous while he had been rude, self-possessed when he had been angry. And then, above all, there was her presence, her monstrous intrusion to rankle in his mind. A woman doctor had been an abstract thing before, repugnant but distant. Now she was there in actual practice, with a brass plate up just like his own, comp... 1 notes
notes24 DEC 2016 by ideonexus
Unlike Physics, Biology Can't Ignore Information
Physicists love to think about systems that take only a little information to describe. So when they get a system that takes a lot of information to describe, they use a trick called 'statistical mechanics', where you try to ignore most of this information and focus on a few especially important variables. For example, if you hand a physicist a box of gas, they'll try to avoid thinking about the state of each atom, and instead focus on a few macroscopic quantities like the volume and total en... 1 notes
notes30 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Barcodes in Nature
I have used the barcode as a
symbol of precise analysis, in all its beauty. Mixed light is sorted into its
rainbow of component colours and everybody sees beauty. That is a first
analysis. Closer detail reveals fine lines and a new elegance, the elegance
of detection, of the bringing of order and understanding. Fraunhofer
barcodes speak to us of the exact elemental nature of distant stars. A
precisely measured pattern of stripes is a coded message from across the
parsecs. There is grace in th... 1 notes
notes03 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Why Social Networks Fail
Identity management is what we all do, every day, consciously or unconsciously. We do it in-person, in face-to-face meetings at work, with our friends, and yes, even with our partners and lovers.
But we do the vast majority of it consciously online. Identity management is simply the curation of the details of your life — what you choose to share, when and with whom. We’re doing it when we share a link on Facebook, or a video on YouTube. What network do we share this with? Who will see it...Folksonomies: social networking
Folksonomies: social networking
1 notes
notesBecause eventually you have so many friends that you can't post anything without fear of offending someone and the image-management becomes to stressful.
02 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function
The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. We found that the same farmer shows diminished cognitive performance ...
1 The stress of poverty can cause a 13 point reduction in IQ that improves when financial security is attained. Details from this article: "In a series of experiments, the researchers found that pressing financial concerns had an immediate impact on the ability of low-income individuals to perform on common cognitive and logic tests. On average, a person preoccupied with money problems exhibited a drop in cognitive function similar to a 13-point dip in IQ, or the loss of an entire night's sleep."
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Mediocrity Principle
The reason this principle is so essential to science is that it’s the beginning of understanding how we came to be here and how everything works. We look for general principles that apply to the universe as a whole first, and those explain much of the story; and then we look for the quirks and exceptions that led to the details. It’s a strategy that succeeds and is useful in gaining a deeper knowledge. Starting with a presumption that a subject of interest represents a violation of the pr... 1 notes
notesP. Z. Myers' explanation for how this principle means we cannot look to supernatural explanations for our origins, because there is no reason to think we are an exception to the rules of the universe.
30 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
Our Collective Memory
Taken globally, the set of traces that we leave in the world does without doubt add up to something. It is through operations on sets of traces that I understand an event that I take part in. Tolstoy wrote about the foot soldier in the Napoleonic wars. The soldier he describes cannot have the experience of the war he is waging nor the battle he is fighting because the only “global” traces of the war are inscriptions—notably, maps and statistics. There is no scalable observation that mov... 1 notes
notesNo one soldier experiences a War. They experience details from their microcosm encounter with the war. The war itself is a collective memory experienced only in history books.
16 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Language Requires a Common Frame of Experience
The greatest is obsolescence, the
meaning of something evocative changing because
the players’ reality has changed since the inspiration
entered it. William Gibson’s ground-breaking cyberpunk
novel Neuromancer begins, “The sky above the
port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Supporting details make it clear that this is an
industrial port at night, the sky gray from pollution
and flecked with ash and other debris. But that was
an image published in 1984. A decade...Folksonomies: communication language
Folksonomies: communication language
1 notes
notesWilliam Gibson compares a sky to the static on a dead television channel, but Neil Gaiman notes that children today get a blue nothing on a dead channel.
01 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Parable of Many People Working on a Large Project
A parable: A man was examining the construction of a cathedral. He asked a stone mason what he was doing chipping the stones, and the mason replied, “I am making stones.” He asked a stone carver what he was doing. “I am carving a gargoyle.&rdquo. And so it went, each person said in detail what they were doing. Finally he came to an old woman who was sweeping the ground. She said. “I am helping build a cathedral.”
...Most of the time each person is immersed in the details of one...Often we are so immersed in the details of our work that we fail to see the big picture of what we are contributing to. I could see this parable apply to anyone in our society, where we all are building civilization.
