theoh

88 ms·

691.
by theoh 9y ago
You mean this idea? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_detection There's another aspect to proto-religion which has to do with power rather than agency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana#Pre
692.
by theoh 9y ago
Actually, there's a bit of 'fire' here, not just smoke. From the harmless stereotypical CS professor who doesn't grok humans, to Zuckerberg's dangerous obliviousness to the humanistic tradition. The Wikipedia page f
693.
by theoh 9y ago
Or, religion is, at least, a form of seeing meaning in things, which is the same category of activity as magical thinking.
694.
by theoh 9y ago
The "crazy notion" is old news: http://www.righto.com/2014/05/a-look-inside-ipad-chargers-pr...
695.
by theoh 9y ago
A related question is "If I had the best professor in the world, what gems would they mention as examples of the beauty of computer science". These things maybe should be on the syllabus, but gems aren't necessarily seen as a
696.
by theoh 9y ago
Can't comment on the respondent's actual attitude to women. As far as painters vs hackers goes, this is a topic which really lends itself to generalisations. They are fundamentally different kinds of person. Here's another at
697.
by theoh 9y ago
OK, by way of acknowledgement of splittingTimes' downvoted clarification, it seems the phrase "the boundaries of our perception are set by basic laws of physics, and that we reach the limits of what is possible" comes verbati
698.
by theoh 9y ago
I can't find what this Lorentz hypothesis of 1911 is, but surely you are claiming too much. Physical entities can detect X-rays, but humans haven't evolved that ability (except, recently, externally/collectively). The idea th
699.
by theoh 9y ago
That's, increasingly, apparently not understood by the average correspondent. Anything other than a continuous block of text preceding a quoted reply ("top posting") may cause confusion.
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by theoh 9y ago
The "relations are what matters" perspective is a structuralist thing, which can be traced to Saussure's linguistics on the philosophical side of things. Henri Poincaré was among the first to affirm a similar view in the scie
701.
by theoh 9y ago
Actually, though, set-builder notation can use the equals sign to express a condition. e.g. the examples here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set-builder_notation . Maybe there are other examples in math.
702.
by theoh 9y ago
Tufte is not a typographer. He knows when to employ a designer (as he did on his first major book, The Visual Display...) but he wouldn't make the claim that he has done "a lot of work on typesetting". In fact, he says "
703.
by theoh 9y ago
It's r-values that cannot be assigned to. What's really missing from most conventional math, I think, is the notion of conditional expressions based on equality testing. "=" is usually only used in a declarative way, to
704.
by theoh 9y ago
> Definition and equality are really the same thing. A definition is just an introduction of a term/variable, and an equality giving it a value. So the only difference is if a term in the equation hasn't been introduced yet. In
705.
by theoh 9y ago
It was someone else's tweet, so I'm afraid I can't comment in any more detail on what they meant. The general idea that 60s cybernetic thinking has little relevance to the concrete present possibilities of economic coordinat
706.
by theoh 9y ago
It's an interesting part of Stafford Beer's life story all right. But as somebody recently said on twitter, Uber has solved the calculation problem ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
707.
by theoh 9y ago
This is a fine lecture by John Stillwell on the question of alien mathematics, and what might constrain it: https://youtu.be/9MV65airaPA
708.
by theoh 9y ago
Seriously, though, getting people to sign up to help implement your renegade ideas is kind of the definition of charisma (as in Max Weber) and gurus and cults are just a little further down that road...
709.
by theoh 9y ago
"What kind of damage" is pretty well-known. See e.g. "Light-Induced Damage to the Retina" http://photobiology.info/Rozanowska.html
710.
by theoh 9y ago
Do notation isn't about sequencing, it's syntactic sugar for the monadic 'bind' operator. Sequencing happens because of data dependencies. This is part of the confusing story about monads -- the fact that every monad is
711.
by theoh 9y ago
Presumably animats is talking about things like "do notation" in Haskell, not innocuous cases of function composition or first-class functions in imperative languages.
712.
by theoh 9y ago
By "intuition" you must mean instinct -- but this isn't a separate category from learned behaviour for an AI that can be trained over the equivalent of many generations. In any case, botnik is not an autonomous AI, and humans
713.
by theoh 9y ago
Wengrow did write a whole book about this. He wasn't just speculating freshly when asked by the author of this article. https://press.princeton.edu/titles/10125.html
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by theoh 9y ago
I'm going to chip in with a random example, a sweet though perhaps flawed design for a tactile interface. The structure of it reminds me of a product type (i.e. an algebraic data type). It's a final project by a recent RCA graduat
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by theoh 9y ago
During or just before WW2, Roy Liming developed analytic techniques for calculating a similar class of blend or fillet. They were taken up in aircraft design, a field that I can't imagine ever using implicit surfaces! I think it was Ed
716.
by theoh 9y ago
Yeah, but do you ever perform an operation on two hexagrams (addition, multiplication)? If not, each hexagram is just a bitstring, not a number in binary notation. If not used as numbers they don't count as numbers. Words written with
717.
by theoh 9y ago
Yes, but I think we're talking specifically about positional numbers using binary digits.
718.
by theoh 9y ago
Good point, but was Pingala actually using the binary elements as digits? I don't know but it seems possible that he didn't do place value arithmetic with binary strings. I previously associated his work with "prosodic enumer
719.
by theoh 9y ago
Faders in DJ equipment are often optical -- apparently a potentiometer would be noisy. http://djtechtools.com/2011/11/01/fader-technology-a-primer/
720.
by theoh 9y ago
Hmmm, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Lee_Rigby

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