02 MAR 2019 by ideonexus
Scientific Laws Mean That God has No Freedom
he one remaining area that reHgion can now lay claim to is the origin of the universe, but even here science is making progress and should soon provide a definitive answer to how the universe began. I published a book that asked if God created the universe, and that caused something of a stir. People got upset that a scientist should have anything to say on the matter of religion. I have no desire to tell anyone what to believe, but for me asking if God exists is a valid question for science... 1 
notes
notes27 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 notes
notes27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Break the Rules of a Game to Improve it
In The Well-Played Game, Bernard DeKoven advocates a fundamental adjustment in players' attitudes towards the rules of a game:
You're not changing the game for the sake of changing it. You're changing it for the sake of finding a game that works.
Once this freedom is established, once we have established why we want to change a game and how we go about it, a remarkable thing happens to us: We become the authorities.
No matter what game we create, no matter how well we are able to play it,...Folksonomies: gameplay
Folksonomies: gameplay
1 notes
notesLike adding a push-your-luck component to Candyland or how SFR took Dragon Dice and refactored the rules to make it work.
21 NOV 2017 by ideonexus
Inversion of Information and Attention
What’s happened is, really rapidly, we’ve undergone this tectonic shift, this inversion between information and attention. Most of the systems that we have in society—whether it’s news, advertising, even our legal systems—still assume an environment of information scarcity. The First Amendment protects freedom of speech, but it doesn’t necessarily protect freedom of attention. There wasn’t really anything obstructing people’s attention at the time it was written. Back in an in...
1 19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
The Chain of Human Rights to Morphological Freedom
The right to life, the right to not have other people prevent oneself from surviving, is a central right, without which all other rights have no meaning. But to realize the right to life we need other rights.
Another central right for any humanistic view of human rights is the right to seek happiness. Without it human flourishing is unprotected, and there is not much point in having a freedom to live if it will not be at least a potentially happy life. In a way the right to life follows from... 1 notes
notesFrom Anders Sandberg's "Morphological Freedom – Why We Not Just Want It, but Need It"
24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Religion and Science are Alike
When I talk about religion, I speak for myself alone. Any statement which attempted to express a consensus of scientists about religious and philosophical questions would miss the main point. There is no consensus among us. The voice of science is a Babel of diverse languages and cultures. That is to me the joy and charm of science. Science is a free creation of the human mind, and at the same time it is an international club cutting across barriers of race and nationality and creed. Many fir... 1 notes
notes21 JUN 2014 by ideonexus
Unnecessary Obstacles Make Games
As a golfer, you have a clear goal: to get a ball in a
series of very small holes, with fewer tries than anyone else. If you weren’t
playing a game, you’d achieve this goal the most efficient way possible: you’d
walk right up to each hole and drop the ball in with your hand. What makes
golf a game is that you willingly agree to stand really far away from each
hole and swing at the ball with a club. Golf is engaging exactly because you,
along with all the other players, have agreed to ma...Folksonomies: gamification
Folksonomies: gamification
1 notes
notes22 APR 2014 by ideonexus
How Big Ideas are Revealed
Big ideas are typically revealed via:
• Core concepts (migration, function)
• Focusing themes (good vs. evil)
• Ongoing debate/issues (nature vs. nurture)
• Illuminating paradox/problem (freedom vs. responsibility)
• Organizing theory/principle (less is more)
• Underlying assumption/perspectives (Occam’s Razor)
• Key questions
• Insightful inferences from facts 1 notes
notesWays to teach.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Externalities
In every economic transaction there is a willing buyer and a willing seller. and they agree on a price that benefits both. But there are spillover effects in many economic transactions—costs and/or benefits that are transferred to third parties. Friedman called these spillovers "neighborhood effects." Today, most economists call them "externalities.
At their most basic, externalities don't have to involve buying and selling. If you smoke in a restaurant instead of stepping outside it's ea... 1 notes
notesExamples of externalities, public side-effects, good and bad, of our personal actions that impact the commons.
23 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Paradox of the Universe
I am afraid all we can do is to accept the paradox and try to accommodate ourselves to it, as we have done to so many paradoxes lately in modern physical theories. We shall have to get accustomed to the idea that the change of the quantity R, commonly called the 'radius of the universe', and the evolutionary changes of stars and stellar systems are two different processes, going on side by side without any apparent connection between them. After all the 'universe' is an hypothesis, like the a...It's radius VS the behavior of stars and stellar systems. Makes one think of the paradox of an expanding universe and one in which galaxies are drawn together through gravity.
