20 MAR 2018 by ideonexus
The Bible of Civilization
But to begin with perhaps I may meet an objection that is likely to arise. I have called this hypothetical book of ours the Bible of Civilization, and it may be that someone will say: Yes, but you have a sufficient book of that sort already; you have the Bible itself and that is all you need. Well, I am taking the Bible as my model. I am taking it because twice in history—first as the Old Testament and then again as the Old and New Testament together—it has formed a culture, and unified a...Folksonomies: civilization idealism
Folksonomies: civilization idealism
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notes
notesAn example of Wells idealism. He envisions a single, unifying book, but his bible is the sum of human literature, and the true story is constantly under revision, but written authoritatively in nature for us to read. He sees a book describing ethical conduct, but again our laws are such a book and we are constantly debating them in the courts and revising them in our legislatures.
10 FEB 2018 by ideonexus
The Thermian Argument
So there's a bad habit people have gotten into. It's nothing new, but it's become more and more common. It goes like this:
Critic: Hello. This is Folding Ideas. I recently watched the anime Women Getting Ripped Apart by Orcs and was, you know, disturbed by the seeming perverse glee the way the show takes the frequent and excessive dismemberment of its female cast members. In fact, the entire purpose of the show seems to be little more than showing women being brutally violated by orcs. Mino... 1 notes
notes29 SEP 2017 by ideonexus
Roman Arithmetic
...basic Roman arithmetic is largely rather simple, even for those of us spoiled by Arabic notation. Addition is no sweat, because complex Roman numbers already use what math pros call additive notation, with numerals set beside one another to create a larger number. VI is just V plus I, after all. To add large numbers, simply pile all the letters together, arrange them in descending order, and there’s your sum. CLXVI plus CLXVI? CCLLXXVVII, or CCCXXXII. And one of the advantages of the Rom... 1 notes
notes02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
Mathematical Cue Words
Addition: add, plus, sum, total, altogether, increased by, grew, gained, total of, combined, more than (as in, “3 more than 7 is 10”), put together, in all
Subtraction: minus, take away, diff erence, less than, from, remove, subtract, gives away, sells, loses, fewer than, decreased by, diff erence between
Multiplication: product, times, doubled (tripled, etc.), some problems give information about one and ask for total amounts (also, when dealing with multiplication of fractions, of us... 1 notes
notes17 MAR 2016 by ideonexus
All the Ways of Intuiting 1729
Stanislas Dehaene brings up the Ramanujan-G.H.Hardy anecdote concerning the number 1729. The idea of running through the cubes of all integers from 1 to 12 in order to arrive at Ramanujan's spontaneous recognition of 1729 as the smallest positive integer that can be written in two distinct ways as the sum of two integral cubes is inappropriate and obscures the workings of the naive mathematical mind. To be sure, a computer-mind could come up with that list at a wink. But what would induce it ... 1 notes
notes14 MAR 2016 by ideonexus
"Holistic" is a Word That Hides Our Ignorance
We're often told that certain wholes are more than the sum of their parts. We hear this expressed with reverent words like holistic and gestalt, whose academic tones suggest that they refer to clear and definite ideas. But I suspect the actual function of such terms is to anesthetize a sense of ignorance. We say gestalt when things combine to act in ways we can't explain, holistic when we're caught off guard by unexpected happenings and realize we understand less than we thought we did.
1 30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Human Combinatoric Reasoning
Humans, of course, were not created in a state of Original Reason. We descended from apes, spent hundreds of millennia in small bands, and evolved our cognitive processes in the service of hunting, gathering, and socializing. Only gradually, with the appearance of literacy, cities, and long-distance travel and communication, could our ancestors cultivate the faculty of reason and apply it to a broader range of concerns, a process that is still ongoing. One would expect that as collective rati...Folksonomies: reasoning combinatorics
Folksonomies: reasoning combinatorics
1 notes
notes30 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Violence Must be Considered Proportionally When Compared ...
In absolute numbers, of course, civilized societies are matchless in the destruction they have wreaked. But should we look at absolute numbers, or at relative numbers, calculated as a proportion of the populations? The choice confronts us with the moral imponderable of whether it is worse for 50 percent of a population of one hundred to be killed or 1 percent of a population of one billion. In one frame of mind, one could say that a person who is tortured or killed suffers to the same degree ...Folksonomies: violence quantification
Folksonomies: violence quantification
1 notes
notes23 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Write With Style
Newspaper reporters and technical writers are trained to reveal almost nothing about themselves in their writings. This makes them freaks in the world of writers, since almost all of the other ink-stained wretches in that world reveal a lot about themselves to readers. We call these revelations, accidental and intentional, elements of style.
These revelations tell us as readers what sort of person it is with whom we are spending time. Does the writer sound ignorant or informed, stupid or bri... 1 notes
notes29 MAY 2014 by ideonexus
The Kiss Precise
Four circles to the kissing come,
The smaller are the benter.
The bend is just the inverse of
The distance from the centre.
Though their intrigue left Euclid dumb
There's now no need for rule of thumb.
Since zero bend's a dead straight line
And concave bends have minus sign,
The sum of squares of all four bends
Is half the square of their sum. Folksonomies: mathematics poetry
Folksonomies: mathematics poetry
If four circles A, B, C, and D, of radii r1, r2, r3, and r4, are drawn so that they do not overlap but each touches the other three, and if we let b1 = 1/r1, etc., then
(b1 b2 b3 b4)^2 = 2(b1^2 b2^2 b3^2 b4^2).
