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...

 The Dream Lover and the Template

For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the maj...

 Paul Bloom: Science Can Maximize Our Happiness

How can we determine the happiest society? As Derek Parfit and others have pointed out, even if you can precisely measure the happiness of each individual, this remains a vexingly hard question. Should we choose the society with the highest total happiness? If so, then a trillion people living miserable lives (but not so miserable that they would rather be dead) will be "happier" than a billion immensely happy people. This seems wrong. Do we calculate averages? If so, then a society with a m...

 Kate Mills: Only "Scientists" Can Do Science

What we think we know about ourselves through science could be skewed, since the majority of psychology studies sample individuals who do not represent the population on a whole. These WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) samples make up the majority of non-clinical neuroimaging studies as well. Increased awareness of this bias has prompted researchers to actively seek out more representative samples. However, there is less discussion or awareness around the potential b...

 NPCs in the Game "Real Life"

The NPCs have no depth. The can only carry on brief repetitive conversations about simple topics, such as the weather or football. They all follow simple repetitive paths from home, to work, to the store, and back home again where they spend the majority of their time watching television.

 The Majority do Robot Work

Someone had to run the harvesters in the rice and sugarcane fields, check the irrigation canals or robots, install things, fix things. Humans were still not only the cheapest robots around, but also, for many tasks, the only robots that could do the job. They were self-reproducing robots too. They showed up and worked, generation after generation; give them three thousand calories a day and a few amenities, a little time off, and a strong jolt of fear, and you could work them at almost anythi...

 Human Rights

After ages of error, after wandering in all the mazes of vague and defective theories, writers upon politics and the law of nations at length arrived at the knowledge of the true rights of man, which they deduced from this simple principle: that he is a being endowed with sensation, capable of reasoning upon and understanding his interests, and of acquiring moral ideas. They saw that the maintenance of his rights was the only object of political union, and that the perfection of the socia...

 Artists Work Alone, Scientists Collaborate

Any artist or novelist would understand—some of us do not produce their best when directed. We expect the artist, the novelist and the composer to lead solitary lives, often working at home. While a few of these creative individuals exist in institutions or universities, the idea of a majority of established novelists or painters working at the 'National Institute for Painting and Fine Art' or a university 'Department of Creative Composition' seems mildly amusing. By contrast, alarm greets ...

 Education Gets Children to Stop Asking "Why?"

Sometimes I am a little unkind to all my many friends in education ... by saying that from the time it learns to talk every child makes a dreadful nuisance of itself by asking 'Why?'. To stop this nuisance society has invented a marvellous system called education which, for the majority of people, brings to an end their desire to ask that question. The few failures of this system are known as scientists.

 Most Marriages Degrade After a Child is Born

A bracingly cold glass of water was thrown on this Eisenhoweresque perception by famed sociologist E.E. LeMasters. In 1957, he published a research paper showing that 83 percent of new parents experienced a moderate to severe crisis in the marriage during the transition to parenthood. These parents became increasingly hostile toward each other in the first year of the baby’s life. The majority were having a hard time. [...] There is hope. We know four of the most important sources of mari...