20 JUN 2017 by ideonexus
Pattern-Building When Learning a New Word
Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends beyond their defi nition to relating words to the pattern of categorization where they fi t. Students attend to how words relate to other words through a number of types of cat... 1 
notes
notes20 JUN 2017 by ideonexus
Category Practice
Students appear to use a different kind of thinking when they create original patterns following rules they create (Grabowski, Damasio, & Damasio, 1998). Activities that engage students in building categories can start as early as preschool. Building category practice can be done with a bag of mixed buttons. After first modeling the procedure, you can have students work on their own or in pairs to sketch the categories they discover. Th is would also work as a language arts learning cente... 1 notes
notesThis would work great with dice. Sort by color or number of sides.
15 JUN 2016 by ideonexus
Greek Philosophical Science of Categorization was Aesthetic
It is not meant that the Greeks had more respect for the function of perception through the senses than has modern science, but that, judged from present practice, they had altogether too mucfy respect for the material of direct, unanalyzed sense-perception.
They were aware of its defects from the standpoint of knowledge. But they supposed that they could correct these defects and supplement their lack by purely logical or "rational" means. They supposed that thought could take the material...Folksonomies: knowledge categorization
Folksonomies: knowledge categorization
1 notes
notes08 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
China to Rate Online Behaviour in Social Credit System
Chinese internet firms are definitely interested, as Ant Financial, a subsidiary of ecommercegiant Alibaba, recently showed. To its popular app Alipay it added a new service which rated a person's credit worthiness on a scale of 350 to 950 points. This score is not only determined by one's lending behavior, but also by hobbies and friends. If friends have a poor lending reputation, this reflects badly on the person, just as prolonged playing of video games. Buying diapers indicates responsibi...Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
Folksonomies: socialism social ratings
1 30 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Bottom-Up VS Top-Down Method for Finding Laws
Broadly speaking, to discover new regularities and laws we either follow top–down or the bottom–up approach (Fig. 1). In the top–down approach, the search begins with an external observation e.g., Newton’s laws of motion. The observer intuitively imagines a set of elements, a set of interactions and a mathematically expressible form to connect the two. Components are weaved into a mental map and experiments are planned to verify or nullify the model. If the experimental observations r... 1 notes
notesFascinating explanation for why laws are harder and harder to find as we move into macroscopic sciences.
29 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
1/9998 Produces Binary Output
The pattern will break down once you get past 8192, which is 2^13. That means that the pattern continues for an impressive 52 significant figures (well, it actually breaks down on the 52nd digit, which will be a 3 instead of a 2).
The reason it works is that 9998 = 10^4 - 2. You can expand as
1 / (10^n - 2) = 1/10^n * 1/(1 - 2/10^n)
= 1/10^n * (1 2/10^n 2^2 /10^2n 2^3 /10^3n ...)
which gives the observed pattern. It breaks down when 2^k has more than n digi... 1 notes
notes16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Simple Laws Produce Complex Phenomena
But the most impressive fact is that gravity is simple. It is simple to state the principles completely and not have left any vagueness for anybody to change the ideas of the law. It is simple, and therefore it is beautiful. It is simple in its pattern. I do not mean it is simple in its action—the motions of the various planets and the perturbations of one on the other can be quite complicated to work out, and to follow how all those stars in a globular cluster move is quite beyond our abil... 1 notes
notesGravity is simple and elegant, but it produces immensely complex interactions of objects in the Universe.
18 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
Society Needs People Who Are Concerned With Ideas, Not Th...
Humanity certainly needs practical men, who get the most out of their work, and, without forgetting the general good, safeguard their own interests. But humanity also needs dreamers, for whom the disinterested development of an enterprise is so captivating that it becomes impossible for them to devote their care to their own material profit. Without the slightest doubt, these dreamers do not deserve wealth, because they do not desire it. Even so, a well-organised society should assure to such... 1 notes
notesQuoting Marie Curie on a class of people who are not materialist, but society should support them so they need not be concerned with materialism.
26 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
We Have Finite Time to Spend in Life
At IndieCade in October 2011, Adam Saltsman, Canabalt's creator, discussed the notion of "time until death." All of us have a finite amount of time on earth, and any time we spend on a particular activity is time that we can't spend doing something else. This means that the time we spend gaming represents most of a game's cost of ownership, far more than any money that we spend. If that time is enjoyable (or rather, if its benefits outweigh its costs), then the game was worth our time.
Value... 1 notes
notesWhen we play games, we should play games that are fun, but also creative and challenging. Easy games are a complete waste of time, like watching TV. Hard games challenge us and make us grow.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Mysteries are Served by Science
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one - million - year - old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth tha...
1 A poet who cannot write about the wonders of science because they understand how it works is a poor bard.
