February 2012
15 posts
3 tags
“If two people have the same priors, and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then their posteriors must be equal. This is so even though they may base their posteriors on quite different information. In brief, people with the same priors cannot agree to disagree.
—Robert Aumann, “Agreeing to Disagree”
Honest people with different beliefs agree to...
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I have often said that economics, to the extent it is a science, is like biology rather than physics. Let me try to make that clearer. By biology, I do not mean the study of the human cell, which we have made a great deal of progress understanding though there is more to learn. I am thinking of biology in the sense of an ecosystem where competition and emergent order create a complex...
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“Our ties with Mexico will be much more firmly established in 2012 because sometime within the next 50 years the Mexican border will become as the Canadian border, a free one, with the formalities and red tape of ingress and egress cut to a minimum so that the residents of both countries can travel back and forth across the line as if it were not there.”
—Sen. Barry Goldwater,...
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Regarding the question of voting, I do not vote for the same reason that I do not pray five times a day facing toward Mecca. I do not believe in representative democracy. I think it is a fiction. That is not to say that I don’t believe Americans exist anymore than calling Allah imaginery means I do not believe that Muslims exist; I believe in voting booths just as much as I believe in...
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‘Julia, do you have a pet?’ Yuri Kotler asked me the other day. Kotler is a young member of the ruling United Russia party and was once an advisor to Boris Gryzlov, former speaker of the Duma. I had asked him how the slowly mounting protests were perceived in the Kremlin. Yes, I said, I do have a pet. A cat. ‘Well, imagine if your cat came to you and started talking,’...
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”________ concluded the interview by stating that even though he does not consider Mr. Jobs to be a friend, he (Mr. Jobs) possesses the qualities to assume a high level political position. It was ________’s opinion that honesty and integrity are not required qualities to hold such a position. ________ recommended him for a position of trust and confidence within the...
5 tags
Some favorite phrases from 'Gravity's Rainbow'
“The wet heat of his bananery”
“Wasted gods urging on a tardy glacier”
“Palimpsests of secret flesh”
“Bureaucratic smegma”
“A lengthy brick improvisation”
“Cucurbitaceous improbabilities”
“His penis a blood monolith”
“Uncounted soapy-liquorice moments”
“Gifts of tungsten, cordite,...
January 2012
18 posts
2 tags
Introducing Meme Pool
I’ve been fascinated by evolution for a long time, but only recently learned enough Python to do something about it. Today, I built a new Tumblr project called Meme Pool. It’s an image blog that evolves new posts, selecting based on likes and replicating based on tags. I think it’s a pretty cool experiment.
Mutations in the Meme Pool come from the images and tags of its...
Forget the trap →
The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you’ve gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you’ve gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you’ve gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?
—Chuang Tzu, quoted by...
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To read the real thing in evolution—to read, say, John Maynard Smith’s “Evolution and the Theory of Games,” or William Hamilton’s new book of collected papers, “Narrow Roads in Gene Land,” is a startling experience to someone whose previous idea of evolution comes from magazine articles and popular books. The field does not look at all like the stories. What...
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At long last, I’ve finished reading the responses to the 2011 Edge question: “What scientific topic would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?” Here are my favorites, arranged (sort of) by concept. Toss a few in your toolbox.
UPDATE: Whoops—I thought these were posted at the end of the year! 190 new responses to the 2012 question were published today. Here is a...
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“One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have.”
—Albert Einstein, Letter to Hans Muehsam, 9 July 1951
In the light of this 1898 Moon model, Mills observed the way we humans nest knowledge, building little models of the world in our own minds. Go read his post.
It’s...
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The Umwelt
In 1909, the biologist Jakob von Uexküll introduced the concept of the umwelt. He wanted a word to express a simple (but often overlooked) observation: different animals in the same ecosystem pick up on different environmental signals. In the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and the odor of butyric acid. For the black ghost knifefish, it’s electrical...
3 tags
Unutamadığım
Açardın,
Yalnızlığımda
Mavi ve yeşil,
Açardın.
Tavşan kanı, kınalı - berrak.
Yenerdim acıları, kahpelikleri…
Gitmek,
Gözlerinde gitmek sürgüne.
Yatmak,
Gözlerinde yatmak zindanı.
Gözlerin hani?
‘To be or not to be’ değil.
‘Cogito ergo sum’ hiç değil…
Asıl iş, anlamak kaçınılmaz’ı,
Durdurulmaz çığı
...
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Jüri
Bütün renkler aynı hızla kirleniyordu,
Birinciliği beyaza verdiler.
Jury
All the colors were getting dirty at the same speed.
They gave First Prize to white.
—Özdemir Asaf, 1955
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The Adventures of Magical Realist Sherlock Holmes:...
In glancing over the collected notes that chronicle our long intimacy, I find many accounts of the fantastic, but few cases in which even the most peculiar facts have not been elucidated by the remarkable methods of my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Of these events, I recall none as singular as those circumstances surrounding the death of General Porfirio Nuñez, leader of the Liberal partisans of...
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Default Settings
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.
On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re...
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My Generation's Sputnik Moments
Noticing solar panels on the other vegan taco truck were made in China.
Realizing everyone else listened to Beach House before me.
Watching “kittensincardigans.tumblr.com” get more reblogs and a three-book publishing deal.
Discovering résumé of guy hired as dancing chimichanga had master’s degree typeset in Futura.
What’s your Sputnik Moment?
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“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked—and rightly so—what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation...
December 2010
1 post
“The funny thing is this: For years, many cultural critics in and of the United States have been telling us that Americans should behave more like threshold earners. We should be less harried, more interested in nurturing friendships, and more interested in the non-commercial sphere of life. That may well be good advice. Many studies suggest that above a certain level more money brings...
November 2010
1 post
3 tags
Loco Motive
From “The Bon Vivant’s Compendium of Modern Cock-Tails,” 2010:
1 oz. Flintstones Complete children’s multivitamins
1/2 oz. No-Doz Maximum Strength alertness aid
1/2 oz. simple syrup
St. Ide’s malt liquor
Lemon twist
Muddle vitamins and caffeine tablets in a collins glass. Fill with crushed ice, simple syrup and malt liquor. Garnish with a lemon twist. Serve to...
October 2010
2 posts
Emily Dickinson: Selected Poems
ed. Google Scribe:
“Hope is the thing with the other two groups of patients with a history of hypertension”
“Because I could not stop laughing”
“I heard a fly buzzing around the forex community”
“My life had stood—a Loaded Gun Insider Newsletter Sign Up!”
“Tell all the truth, but it is not a valid stream resource in the United...
The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats (feat. Google Scribe)
Turning and turning in the widening of the gap between the two groups of patients with a history of the world and the world of the living, / The falcon cannot hear the music of the spheres of the same name as the original one. / Things fall apart; the center cannot wait to see what the problem is. / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world of the living...
August 2010
1 post
“I don’t like Washington,” Langewiesche said. “And I’m very skeptical of Washington’s view of the world. I think Washington is a very sick city. And it has become an imperial city that is hemmed in by its power. And carries with it an arrogance, a blindness about its own limitations in the world in which we live.”
—William Langewiesche, quoted in...
May 2010
3 posts
3 tags
The Guizot Conjecture
Here are a few other relevant questions from the Pew report alluded to earlier, edited to isolate age:
Not only are those under 30 more trusting of government, but less likely to feel threatened by government, more likely to see a positive personal impact, more content (but mostly frustrated), least likely to support reform and most favorable towards maintaining federal programs. It is...
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“It gives you hope, and that hope, like, turns into trust in the government,...”
– Brittany Tucker, voice of my generation.
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The New 'College Try'
“Our research documents and quantifies changes in time use by full-time college students at four-year institutions in the United States between 1961 and 2004. We find dramatic declines in academic time investment over this period. Full-time college students in 1961 allocated about 40 hours per week to academics, whereas full-time students in 2004 invested 26-28 hours per week. Declines...
April 2010
8 posts
San Clemente, July 19, 1974, 10:06 p.m. PDT.
Henry Kissinger: Hello.
President Nixon: Hello, Henry.
Kissinger: Mr. President.
Nixon: Apparently the battle is started, huh?
Kissinger: Yeah. They are apparently bombing Nicosia and firing on another town and we haven’t had a Greek reaction yet. I’ve got Sisco going to Athens under protest because he thinks it might be a little...
4 tags
“Part of our present difficulty is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our...”
– F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit. Altruistic cooperation and impersonal market exchange can coexist. See also Vernon Smith’s Nobel lecture, which references this excerpt.
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“I was pleased and fascinated by the Ash Cloud because it reaffirmed the...”
– Karl Sabbagh, writing in Edge. Of course, the synecdoches represent real, complex, and unforeseen events. I am not entirely sure I find this pleasant and fascinating as much as humbling and troublesome.
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Not that solitary, inconsistently poor,...
“The Hobbesian vision of society without a state has been an extremely influential one. Our experiment creates an institutionless state of nature in which we observe how real people interact. We find that, although far from utopian, there are much higher levels of cooperation in Hobbesian anarchy than what many have alleged. In sum, we find the following:
Our experimental Hobbesian...
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'Encyclopedias have been, I'd say, my life's chief...
Denis Dutton: People sometimes say that they see Berkeley in stories like “Orbis Tertius.”
Jorge Luis Borges: Yes, I suppose they do. Well, of course. But in that story I was led by literary means also.
DD: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story? Could you explain that?
Borges: Oh, well, yes, I’ll explain very easily…. Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my...
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Is property pre-social?
“We report experimental evidence showing that human fighting decisions are sensitive to resource distribution, asymmetries in power, and asymmetries in prior residence. The human residence effect shown here is of particular importance given centuries of debate about the foundations of human property. We observed an ownership convention in an experimental environment which allowed minimal...