May 2013
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WORD OF THE DAY: "BLEB"
Noun
bleb (plural blebs)
A bubble, such as in paint or glass
(medicine) A large vesicle or bulla, usually containing a serous fluid
(cytology) An irregular bulge in the plasma membrane of a cell undergoing apoptosis
(geology) A bubble-like inclusion of one mineral within another
Verb
bleb (third-person singular simple present blebs, present participle blebbing, simple past and past...
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“The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us,...”
– Pope Francis (source)
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“A wife is a luxury, a smart accountant a necessity.”
– 255th Rule of Acquisition
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ugh I think I ate some bad fish
so now I’m quite unwell and I had to call in sick to work and I think my boss sounded like she thinks I’m making it up so
perfect
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If all logicians know that semantics comes from models, why don’t more AI people talk about how meaning should come from mental models?
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Words, Phrases, Clauses →
This text and its exercises build upon Joseph M. Williams’ Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by providing extensive basic discussion, more examples, and exercises sorted into categories based on difficulty.
I found this interesting, helpful, and enlightening.
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“This idea that there is generality in the specific is of far-reaching...”
– Douglas Hofstadter, GEB
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“In the particular is contained the universal.”
– James Joyce
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ixthil:
Based on some stuff on Reddit: What if we had Quentin Tarantino remake a Wes Anderson movie, Wes Anderson remake a David Lynch movie, and David Lynch remake a Quentin Tarantino movie, all in their respective styles?
Then for fun afterwards have them all collaborate on a Space Jam remake.
Tarantino should remake The Life Aquatic, because that movie could afford to be more violent and...
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Quantum biology →
Neill Lambert, Yueh-Nan Chen, Yuan-Chung Cheng, Che-Ming Li, Guang-Yin Chen, and Franco Nori - 2012-12
Recent evidence suggests that a variety of organisms may harness some of the unique features of quantum mechanics to gain a biological advantage. These features go beyond trivial quantum effects and may include harnessing quantum coherence on physiologically important timescales. In this brief...
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Do any of you people like Pynchon? I have too much stuff to read to even be able to pretend to myself that I could start on a work of his anytime soon, but it seems to me that Pynchon is something weird and worthwhile. Can someone recommend a good place to start within his body of work?
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Like many Americans, I grew up with “meow”, but over time I’ve come to prefer “miao”.
Thoughts?
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CATEGORIFIED ALGEBRA AND QUANTUM MECHANICS →
Jeffrey Morton - 2006-01
Interest in combinatorial interpretations of mathematical entities stems from the convenience of the concrete models they provide. Finding a bijective proof of a seemingly obscure identity can reveal unsuspected significance to it. Finding a combinatorial model for some mathematical entity is a particular instance of the process called “categorification”. Examples include...
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Have you guys read Eliezer’s new paper, Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics? It’s pretty good. Anybody wanna talk about it?
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“It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in...”
– Charles Darwin
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Combinatorial Information Theory: I. Philosophical... →
Robert K. Niven - 2007-04
This study critically analyses the information-theoretic, axiomatic and combinatorial philosophical bases of the entropy and cross-entropy concepts. The combinatorial basis is shown to be the most fundamental (most primitive) of these three bases, since it gives (i) a derivation for the Kullback-Leibler cross-entropy and Shannon entropy functions, as simplified forms of...
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Seinfelt: The Ride-Along →
seinfelt:
George starts going for police ride-alongs in order to avoid paying for cabs, using a pay phone to call in anonymous tips close to his destination. It works well until someone else calls in an anonymous tip turning him in, resulting in the police cruiser he’s in driving in endless circles. Jerry finds he can’t speak without vomiting a strange, clear fluid, and over the course of the...
April 2013
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When the US military explicitly says they don't... →
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“The SAT is a scam. It has been around for 50 years. It has never measured...”
– John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review
(source)
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Seinfelt: The Post-It Notes →
seinfelt:
George takes a convoluted route through a museum in an attempt to avoid getting “corralled” through the gift shops on his way out. He ends up increasingly lost, in stranger and stranger exhibits.
Elaine is frustrated by a coworker who only communicates through Post-It notes. Every time she tries to confront the woman in person, she manages to quickly slip away, leaving only a Post-It...
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“[The 2001 album “White Blood Cells”] was the first time for the band...”
– White Blood Cells on Wikipedia
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“Right now there are a lot of people who sort of think they ought to sign up for...”
– Eliezer Yudkowsky
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you guys I did it
I finished The Road to Reality
I started reading that book circa 2005
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The root of all value: a neural common currency... →
Dino J Levy and Paul W Glimcher - 2012-06
How do humans make choices between different types of rewards? Economists have long argued on theoretical grounds that humans typically make these choices as if the values of the options they consider have been mapped to a single common scale for comparison. Neuroimaging studies in humans have recently begun to suggest the existence of a small group of...
