March 2010
22 posts
"Biannual" and "Semiannual"
There’s one simple secret to keeping these straight: just remember that you’re specifying a period, not a frequency. “Annual” means there is one year between each occurrence, so “Biannual” means two years between each occurrence, and “Semiannual” means half a year between each occurrence (or twice each year). Same goes for “biweekly,”...
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It’s been a while since I’ve posted a...
How do you see the mind-body problem?
I’ve identified 8 schools of thought, and developed this handy textual flowchart to guide you to deciding which to identify with! Just answer the questions according to your intuition and follow the numbers.
Is there any hope of ever understanding consciousness scientifically? If yes, go to 5. If no, go to 2.
Could a conscious mind exist without any physical embodiment (bored though it...
“I was thinking about my Scrabble days while driving today, and something dawned...”
– Richard Blankman
“This business has changed. There are no phones anymore. There are simply things...”
– Gizmodo’s critique of Sony
It's a real-life heist! →
Is it wrong that I think it’s kind of awesome that some people actually pulled this off? >_>
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“The Mad Hatter and the March Hare champion the mathematics of William Rowan...”
– an unorthdox interpretation of Alice in Wonderland as a metaphor for counterintuitive mathematics
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Is this art?...and why that's the wrong question. →
(by Julia Galef)
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“Perhaps there are people who don’t think visually…who imagine things...”
– Marvin Minsky
“The philosophers have convinced the world that the important thing about quantum...”
– Marvin Minsky
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Why is our universe here?
(Sorry, faithful readers, but I’m simply in a philosophical mood lately!)
This is one of the classic questions in philosophy: Why are we here? Or, adding evolution to the picture: Why is our universe here?
My standard response to this sort of question is a strong form of the anthropic principle, combined with an appeal to the notion that all logically consistent universes may lay the same...
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Sense vs. Denotation, Interpreted vs. Compiled,...
This post is about a deep, yet subtle, philosophical point. It’s being written at 8am by an author who hasn’t slept the previous night, and who admits that his idea is highly underdeveloped, but certainly merits more investigation. In short, it has all the marks of a meaningless crackpot theory that is hardly suitable for public consumption, and threatens the credibility of its...
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iPhone photos
One of the shortcomings of the iPhone 3G is its integrated camera. Quite simply, it’s low-quality.
There are now several apps available to further destroy the image quality - but in a way that’s somehow artistically valuable, and subsumes the merely annoying deficiencies of the original:
It’s pretty impressive to me that you can even do this kind of image manipulation on...
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