27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
The Universality of Play
Gutsmuths.—Many of the ideas in PHome are better expressed, though independently arrived at, in the remarkable volume on play, published by Gutsmuths, ‘the father of play in Germany,’ towards the end of the eighteenth century. Gutsmuths recognised the universality of play among all ages and all peoples, the infinite number of games and the skill exhibited by the race in their invention and manipulation, the health-giving quality of play and its ultimate origin (though fatigue and ennui ... 1 
notes
notes18 MAY 2017 by ideonexus
The Wonder of a Child Learning Their Native Language
Imagine you are
faced with the following challenge: You must discover the underlying
structure of an immense system that contains tens of thousands of
pieces, all generated by combining a small set of elements in various
ways. These pieces, in turn, can be combined in an infinite number of
ways, although only a subset of these combinations is actually correct.
However, the subset that is correct is itself infinite. Somehow you must
rapidly figure out the structure of this system so that you c... 1 notes
notes10 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Gamification Card Drafting Mechanic
Mrs. Lee creates five decks of cards to structure her assessment—each deck has two cards more than the total number of students (to increase variability). The cards in Deck 1 have the name of a 20th century poet who was not the subject of an in-class discussion. The cards in Deck 2 each feature a poetic theme (e.g., love, death). The cards in Deck 3 stipulate a poetic technique (e.g., assonance, metaphor). The cards in Deck 4 feature a form of creative expression (e.g., write a song, write ...Folksonomies: education gamification
Folksonomies: education gamification
1 notes
notes26 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
<em>g</em> Presumes Unidimensionality
In a multidimensional set of interrelations among tests, one axis can be found that accounts for as much of the interrelatedness as possible, even when it is known that more dimensions are required. The g-men have defined that largest dimension as g. They haven’t discovered it, as they are fond of saying, any more than the Greenwich Meridian was discovered by the International Meridian Conference in 1884. Any set of interrelated tests has to have a largest dimension, so under this d...Folksonomies: iq measurement
Folksonomies: iq measurement
1 19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Religion Prevented Immortality
The other way was if you do various kinds of mumbo-jumbo then this great agent in the sky will come down and give you eternal life, in which case you could have an infinite number of sports cars. And so Pascal’s wager: either you believe in God or you don’t; if there is no God it can’t do any harm to believe in him because he’s not going to punish you because he doesn’t exist; on the other hand if you don’t believe in him and there is one then he’ll be mad at you and you won’t... 1 notes
notesFrom Marvin Minsky'S "Why Freud Was the First Good AI Theorist"
17 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Spider Trap
A spider trap (or crawler trap) is a set of web pages that may intentionally or unintentionally be used to cause a web crawler or search bot to make an infinite number of requests or cause a poorly constructed crawler to crash. Web crawlers are also called web spiders, from which the name is derived. Spider traps may be created to "catch" spambots or other crawlers that waste a website's bandwidth. They may also be created unintentionally by calendars that use dynamic pages with l...Folksonomies: computer science hacking
Folksonomies: computer science hacking
1 notes
notesAn infinite-recursion website that lures web-crawlers into an infinite-indexing loop.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Archeologist's Search Image
A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything he sees in his search for telltale clues. A kind of mental radar works even if he isn't concentrating hard. A fossil mollusk expert has a mollusk search image. A fossil antelope expert has an antelope search image. ... Yet even when one has a good internal radar, the search is incredibly more difficult than it sounds. Not only are fossils often the same color as the rocks among...Folksonomies: fossils archeology
Folksonomies: fossils archeology
1 notes
notesVaries from hunter to hunter, but must be able to find camouflaged bones that might be fragmented into many pieces.
05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Universe is One Great Machine
Look round the world, contemplate the whole and every part of it: you will find it to be nothing but one great machine, subdivided into an infinite number of lesser machines, which again admit of subdivisions to a degree beyond what human senses and faculties can trace and explain. All these various machines, and even their most minute parts, are adjusted to each other with an accuracy which ravishes into admiration all men who have ever contemplated them. The curious adapting of means to end... 1 notes
notesMade up of smaller machines.
06 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) photograph
Here we go again, one of the epic documents of our time, the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (UDF) photograph, the deepest look into space ever. A random part of the sky, so small it could be covered by a pinhead held at arm's length. A part of the sky -- as NASA says -- that you'd see looking through an eight-foot-long soda straw. A photo exposed over 400 orbits of the Hubble, a total exposure of 11.3 days. The telescope pointing precisely to the same point in space even as it whizzes around the Ear...
1 It would take 12.7 million such photos to cover our night sky, and there are 10,000 galaxies in this image.
12 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
QED Explained
Feynman's graphical method provides a way of visualizing each term in the sum over histories. Those pictures, called Feynman diagrams, are one of the most important tools of modern physics. In QED the sum over all possible histories can be represented as a sum over Feynman diagrams like those below, which represent some of the ways it is possible for two electrons to scatter off each other through the electromagnetic force. In these diagrams the solid lines represent the electrons and the wav... 1 notes
notesA good description of the Feynman Diagrams from QED and how the infinite possibilities must be accounted for in mathematics dealing with them.
