The Electric Nomad is a standard sized electric guitar that features all the usual features usability and playability of a normal electric guitar however it is designed so that it collapses.
“Sometime over the course of new arrivals’ first year in the city, they find themselves becoming New Yorkers.” Also confirms above survey with anecdotal evidence.
Two and a half pages on how to write better, not just for philosophy. I like, “You should assume that the first draft of each sentence will have to be fixed up.” (my emphasis)
Warren Buffet’s letters to his shareholders. Makes for surprisingly good reading… I just wish I had his sort of bad news, like, there’s no way you can expect us to keep doing this well. - I’m sorry that our predictions from last year were off. Of course, we did much better this year…
I recently had a discussion with Mr. R. Brown about eating meat. He tried to maintain that vegetarians have the moral high ground. Even though I successfully defended my omnivorous position (even against his cannibalism tack), I’m thinking Zizek’s ad hominem is now the way to go (26s) [via]:
“What sort of person subjects children as young as 12 to beatings and a life of prostitution? An evidence list submitted in the case of Corey Davis, a Queens man who billed himself as “Magnificent,” might provide some insight. Mr. Davis, 36, is facing a minimum of 23 years in prison after pleading guilty in March to a federal charge of sex trafficking involving a 12-year-old runaway.
“… But then things went dark, weird, and creepy: one girl laughed, but then so did another, and then another, and then another, and then another.
After exposure, the incubation period from nothing to hysteria was short, from a few hours to a couple of days. There was no fever, no physical symptoms, just laughter and occasional crying between short moments of exhausted recuperation. When victims were restrained they sometimes became violent…”
This is a video of a reporter being waterboarded in order to investigate torture and ‘agressive’ interrogation… It is weird stuff. Be sure to check out the accompanying article.
“This map was constructed by sorting roughly 800,000 published papers into 776 different scientific paradigms based on how often the papers were cited together by authors of other papers.”
(they’re all out of free posters now, but the file is available so you can print one for yourself)
Check out this video describing the technology that is going to be used in the new Nintendo Wii Motion Plus. General relativity needs to be accounted for to accurately measure motion in 3D space (true 6 degrees of freedom) by using both accelerometers and gyroscopes. But perhaps the most interesting part of the site is the disclaimer at the bottom (my emphasis):
“InvenSense sensors should not be used or sold in the development, storing, production and utilization of any conventional or mass-destructive weapons or any other weapons or life-threatening applications as well as in any other life-critical applications including but not limited to medical equipment, transportation, aerospace and nuclear instruments, undersea equipment, power plant equipment, disaster prevention and crime prevention equipment.”
Culture
Nadia Comaneci, Montreal 1976 TEN!!! [1:06] (via plump plum)
Last but not least this is what I consider to be a throwback to vintage internet. We are talking a space background repeating image here people; I don’t think I’ve seen that since ‘97. Plus something for nearly everyone: lots of links, e.g. useful information like an up to date guide to SEO, and Women Chess Grandmasters.
“But Ms. Roche told the audience here that her inspiration for the book came not from those women, but from the feminine-product aisle of her local store. Peeking out at the audience from under dark brown bangs, speaking in a childish voice that accentuated her transgressions against propriety, Ms. Roche explained, to howls of laughter, how the lemon-scented products called out to her in uncensored terms that she was, as the commercials put it, not so fresh, or at least not fresh enough.”
The Miracle Fruit, a Tease for the Taste Buds
A small red berry called miracle fruit temporarily rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.
A study conducted by Britain’s First Research Group for Breast Health attached to the University of Portsmouth could throw some light on the little understood causes of ‘Breast Pain’
… you know there was some lucky male lab assistant required to measure breast motion
Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil
One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted tribes is photographed from the air on the Peru-Brazil border.
Aesthetics, Etc.
19 Artists You Can’t Afford To Miss Out On
“From half-naked pink girls to Isometric grinning trees, these artists are sure to satisfy the sucrose cravings in your eyeballs. Check them out before they get too famous and start making stuff nobody gets.”
“Partly inspired by Franz Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and partly by the American system of capital punishment as well as the current political situation, the piece is an ironic approach to killing and torture machines. A moving megaphone speaker encircles an electric dental chair. The chair is covered in pink fun fur…” [via]
I once worked for a pathology department, and my job required that I go to the morgue on a regular basis (multiple times a day). The human body is completely awesome. These pics are a little gruesome, but then again, so are we.
Speaking of being completely awesome:
Five-year-old inventor comes up with a better broom. (At 5 I invented the bag-o-bags: a bag that contained other bags, so that you would have lots of bags. It was a homework assignment in kindergarten. I recall being pissed because I didn’t think it was fair that at 5 we should be asked to know enough to solve anything. My parents still tease me about it till this day.)
On pages 44-47 when describing the difference between Dependence Logic and Independence Friendly Logic Väänänen says,
The backslashed quantifier,
∃xn\{xi0,…,xim-1}φ,
introduced in ref. [20], with the intuitive meaning:
“there exists xn, depending only on xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”
…
The slashed quantifier,
∃xn/{xi0,…,xim-1}φ,
used in ref. [21] has the following intuitive meaning:
“there exists xn, independently of xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”
which we take to mean
“there exists xn, depending only on variables other than xi0,…,xim-1, such that φ,”
The backslashed quantifier notation is part of what Väänänen calls ‘Dependence Friendly Logic’, and is equivalent to the ‘Dependence Logic’ that the rest of the book expounds. This backslash notation makes the difference between Dependence (Friendly) Logic and Independence Friendly Logic clear by showing that the former logic takes the notion of dependence to be fundamental whereas the latter takes independence to be fundamental. Väänänen takes this to be an advantage because he says that Dependence Logic avoids making
one ha[ve] to decide whether “other variable” refers to other variables actually appearing in a formula ?, or to other variables in the domain…
However, this treatment misses an important philosophical difference between Independence Friendly Logic and Dependence Logic. Dependence Logic is fundamentally based upon Wilfrid Hodges work, ‘Compositional Semantics for a language of imperfect information’ in Logic Journal of the IGPL (5:4 1997) 539-563, in which Hodges lays out a compositional semantics for languages such as Independence Friendly Logic using sets of assignments instead of individual assignments to determine satisfaction (T or F). Väänänen infers that Independence Friendly logic is just a bit unruly when it comes to specifying variables because he is working within a system that assumes sets of assignments are a useful and unproblematic way to determine satisfaction.
However the unseen problem of using sets of assignments is that something is added by assuming the domain is a set. For example, let’s take try to define a location and take the set of all the points in the universe. However, we immediately run into relativity: All locations are defined relative to each other and the people trying to figure out where things are, i.e. There is no predetermined set of all the points in the universe. The issue is that the domain of potential assignments, the objects in the universe, may be dependent upon the person or people using them (the players of the semantic game in this case). If the domain is dependent upon the players, the set cannot be constructed until after the players have begun the game. Therefore, if we postulate that the domain is a set at the outset then the players know something about the game that they are playing, namely that it does not depend upon them because it was predetermined.
Following this line of thought it seems possible to constructed a game in which the domain {Abelard, Eloise} is such that Abelard and Eloise are the actual people playing the game and the formula is ‘Someone x lost the game by instantiating this formula’ such that whoever instantiated that formula would win the game according to the rules. But then the formula would not be satisfied, so that player would have lost, but then it would be satisfied, a paradox. It is easy enough to declare that the domain must be independent of the players, but again this signals something about the game being played to the players before the formula to be is revealed.
Lastly there is something to be said about using logic to represent natural language here too: if you consider the set of all possible responses to some question, you are not ever considering all possible responses, but all the possible responses you can think of at that time. Therefore if we are using game semantics and imperfect information to represent natural language, then it is a mistake to predetermine the domain of all possible responses separate from the people involved. Again, the domain being linked to the people involved is at odds with the domain being a predetermined set.
Long story short, there is a very good reason for not always using sets of assignments to determine satisfaction. Depending on the situation, a set may offer non-trivial information about a game or misconstrue the game being played. Independence Friendly logic makes no assumptions about the type of game being played and is therefore of greater scope than logics that are based upon Hodges work. Of course one is free to use sets of assignments to determine satisfaction and derive set-theoretic results, but the compositionality gained comes at the price of limiting the types of games that can be played.
“Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life?”
“Chef/mad scientist Dave Arnold of the French Culinary Institute has figured out how to vacuum infuse a martini inside a cucumber.” - I have to admit I’ve watched this video over and over and over.
The quote from Core77 is priceless: You have to see this video–this %#&*@ robot simply won’t go down. Watch as the guy tries to kick it over at the 00:36 mark. Watch as it goes uphill and downhill in snow, traverses slippery ice, and leaps accurately over demarcated distances. The most disturbing thing is that once it loses its balance, like at the 1:29 mark, it frantically scrabbles to regain its footing with the grotesque urgency of a locomoting cockroach. This machine looks like it will carry out its mission at any cost.
“Geospatial technologies using satellite imagery, internet-integrated mapping or GPS aren’t just for spyware - these days they are employed to detect, map and analyse human rights violations to help NGOs like Amnesty International. Using widely available tools such as Google Earth, Lars Bromley, director of the Geospatial Technologies and Human Rights Project of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has been digitally capturing atrocities against civilians in Darfur, Zimbabwe, North Korea, the Gaza Strip and Burma. He tells PingMag all about geospatial technologies.” - Go look at the pictures.
I’ve agreed to host the Philosopher’s Carnival here on February 18. So if you think you got what it takes, tough guy/gal, submit a post and I’ll tell you whether you’re up to snuff.
Welcome. I'm interested by metaphysics, relativity, philosophy of science & language and women philosophically inclined or not. But there will probably be a bit of everything here, kind of like me.
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