17 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
notes21 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
World-Building Questions
1. BASIC INFRASTRUCTURE
There can be no human (or alien) civilization or settlement without plumbing, energy supply, or waste disposal. So you need to spend at least a little bit figuring out how all of this worksunderneath your story’s setting.
How do your characters eat? How do they transport and store food?
How is waste handled?
Where does the water come from?
Who provides the clothes and shoes (or gear)?
What money system is there? Is there a single currency? Several? Electronic mo...Folksonomies: writing science fiction
Folksonomies: writing science fiction
1 19 DEC 2014 by ideonexus
How the Finance Industry Hurts the Economy
In perhaps the starkest illustration, economists from Harvard University and the University of Chicago wrote in a recent paper that every dollar a worker earns in a research field spills over to make the economy $5 better off. Every dollar a similar worker earns in finance comes with a drain, making the economy 60 cents worse off.
[...]
...the growth of complex financial products has served primarily to boost income for the firms themselves, Philippon said. A new paper from researchers in t... 1 notes
notes22 MAR 2014 by koo5
getting water from air
in 2011 an Australian inventor won the James Dyson Award for a device that cools the air using underground coils, so you only need enough energy to pump the air down a pipe.
Another low energy technique is that used in the Atacama Desert in Chile, and is basically just a piece of mesh strung between two poles, with a trough under it. They get a fog too, and as it flows through the mesh, drops of water condense and run down into the trough.
But NBD Nano claim that the beetle’s skin is sev...Folksonomies: water
Folksonomies: water
lostinscience.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/how-to-make-a-self-filling-water-bottle/
27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Why Economists Will Continue to be Wrong
Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many ...They make models based on past data, and when they fail to predict the future, they adjust them to match the new past data. The problem is that so many models will match the past data, there could be no end to the number of models they throw out.
03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Fossil Fuels are Humanity's "Starter"
Now we have comprehended and peeled off the layers of petals
which disclosed not only that physical energy is conserved but also
that it is ever increasingly deposited as a fossil-fuel savings account
aboard our Spaceship Earth through photosynthesis and
progressive, complex, topsoil fossilization buried ever deeper
within Earth's crust by frost, wind, flood, volcanoes, and earthquake
upheavals. We have thus discovered also that we can make all of
humanity successful through science's world-e... 1 notes
notesThey are here to get the engine of sustainable energy running, we have to get the engine running before they are exhausted or the car of civilization is dead.
05 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Sociological Metaphors for the Public
Social science and philosophy have generated a vast number of other
metaphorical descriptions of the public, rooted in different and often scientific perspectives on systematicity and relation. These are technologies in the broad sense that they enable different kinds of questions to be asked. An account of these would include the public as:
A Physical System or Mass: This metaphor underwrites work in mass commu- nications and allows one to ask questions like “What is the impact of a given... 1 notes
notesMetaphors are an important means of understanding abstract concepts.
17 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
The Origin of Interest
The international trading became the most profitable of all enterprises, and great land-"owners" with clear-cut king's "deeds" to their land went often to international gold moneylenders. The great land barons underwrote the building of enterprisers' ships with their cattle or other real wealth, the regenerative products of their lands, turned over to the lender as cccollateral.
If the ship did come back, both the enterpriser and the bankers realized a great gain. The successful ship ventur... 1 notes
notesFrom when bankers would hold cattle as collateral, and the cattle had calves. The calves were the interest.
01 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
GRUNCH
There is no dictionary word for an army of invisible giants, one thousand miles tall, with their arms
interlinked, girding the planet Earth. Since there exists just such an invisible, abstract, legal-contrivance
army of giants, we have invented the word GRUNCH as the group designation--"a grunch of giants."
GR-UN-C-H, which stands for annual GROSS UNIVERSE CASH HEIST, pays annual dividends of
over one trillion U.S. dollars.
GRUNCH is engaged in the only-by-instrumentsreached-and-operated, en...Folksonomies: environmentalism sustainabillity
Folksonomies: environmentalism sustainabillity
1 notes
notesAcronym for the forces preventing human progress and sustainability for their own selfish gain.
13 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Money is Fiction
Ira Glass: For money, afterall, long ago, we used to use gold, and if you wanted to buy something, you had to carry around these heavy, shiny pieces of metal. Then we decided, no, let's just leave the gold in a bank. Instead of the gold, we're going to carry around these pieces of paper, and the paper on them says, "Yes, there's gold. You can take this paper money to a bank, you can swap it for gold." Maybe you've seen old dollars that say on them "Promise to pay the bearer so many dollars in...
1 Today there is not gold backing money, nor even bills for much of the money possessed by the people of the United States. It's just and idea we agree upon.
