04 NOV 2018 by ideonexus
Metagame
Metagaming refers to the relationship between the game and outside elements, including everything from player attitudes and play styles to social reputations and social contexts in which the game is played. Post-game locker room conversations about the match are metagame interactions. Memorizing words in the Scrabble dictionary is a metagame activity, the honing of in-game skills. The typical playing strategies of a particular Go master are metagame information, useful if you are playing agai... 1 
notes
notes19 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Hand Axes as an Extended Phenotype
Two and a half million years ago, our small-brained ancestors
evolved the ability to knock flakes from rocks to use as cutting edges. By doing so, they could also make the rocks themselves useful as choppers. This basic tool kit of flakes and choppers served the needs of hunting and gathering for a million years. Then, around 1.6 million years ago, a medium-brained African hominid (Homo erectus) evolved the ability to produce an extraordinary object that archeologists call a handaxe. A handax... 1 notes
notesIf, as the author assumes, handaxes were genetically-informed because they did not change for hundreds of thousands of years, then why do we not still have the instinct for hand axes?
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
There is No Scientific Basis for Prejudice
Break the chains of your prejudices and take up the torch of experience, and you will honour nature in the way she deserves, instead of drawing derogatory conclusions from the ignorance in which she has left you. Simply open your eyes and ignore what you cannot understand, and you will see that a labourer whose mind and knowledge extend no further than the edges of his furrow is no different essentially from the greatest genius, as would have been proved by dissecting the brains of Descartes ...Folksonomies: prejudice
Folksonomies: prejudice
1 The brains of laborers and geniuses are anatomically identical.
12 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Foundation of Science, Not the Periphery, Is Where th...
A number of years ago, when I was a freshly-appointed instructor, I met, for the first time, a certain eminent historian of science. At the time I could only regard him with tolerant condescension.
I was sorry of the man who, it seemed to me, was forced to hover about the edges of science. He was compelled to shiver endlessly in the outskirts, getting only feeble warmth from the distant sun of science- in-progress; while I, just beginning my research, was bathed in the heady liquid heat up a... 1 notes
notesIsaac Asimov describing his young experience with a professor as he worked on new research.
19 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
What Makes Something a Distinct Object?
Let me look at the envelope from a very basic point of view,
that of the neurophysiology of raw perception itself. Forgive me
if it’s a bit oversimple. Take me-on the back of your retina
I’m upside down, focused at the center but fuzzy at the edges,
two-dimensional, a barrage of photons releasing rhodopsin and
triggering neural impulses along the visual nerve. At the same
time, the pressure wave I’m setting up right now with all this talk
is causing little hairs inside the cochlea, in y...Folksonomies: perception
Folksonomies: perception
1 notes
notesOur perceptions are built on photons hitting our retinas and pressure variations tickling the folicles in our cochleas... so how does all that become something distinct in our mind's eye?
10 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Naturalism Improves Perception
Nature study also heightens our perceptive
abilities: we see, hear and smell more, and more
keenly, because of them. In the cities, our senses tend
to atrophy. The relentless commercial badgering of
signs, and the general dullness and ugliness of city
landscapes, push the urban walker into the safe
cocoon of his mind and further out of his senses.
Simply spending time out in pastoral or wild
landscapes counteracts this tendency. Spend a day in
the woods and you will begin to hear a bit more a...Being attentive to nature heightens our senses because of the enjoyment we get from listening, seeing, smelling, and feeling it.
