thebox

Another Small Step for Man

While China has had their first manned space walk (third manned mission), the US just had their first privately organized space flight. Very cool.

The Century Of Self

Chomsky refers to this all the time. Where propaganda, had become a bad word near the beginning of the century, the term "Public Relations" began to be used. Propaganda was rooted in Freud's idea that human nature had hidden primitive sexual and animal forces.

This series is about how those in power have used Freud's theories to try and control the dangerous crowd in the age of mass democracy. This is a very interesting series (see parts one, two, three, four).

Ron Eglash: African fractals, in buildings and braids

""I am a mathematician, and I would like to stand on your roof." This is how Ron Eglash greeted many African families while researching the intriguing fractal patterns he noticed in villages across the continent. He talks about his work exploring the rigorous fractal math underpinning African architecture, art and even hair braiding."

Ok, last Ted talk, I promise. This is seriously far out.

Beauty and truth in physics

I picture some Star Trek caricature talking to an alien. They are engaged in intergalactic diplomacy and we need our best scientists to help in the discussion. It's interesting knowing that we as a human race and they as an alien race, would be arguing using some of the same physical theories. Or rather, the laws of physics exists throughout the universe. This is kind of a surprising talk where Murray Gell-Mann discusses why beauty is a good criteria for choosing those physical theories.

... for some reason the embedded link isn't working in the post (only in the preview). So here's a link.

Innate Language facility upended

Or that's what American linguist Dan Everett is posing. He has spent a few decades living with and researching Piraha, a group of people indigenous to the Amazon rain forests. He first went down as a missionary, trying to convert the people by translating the bible into their native tongue. The people however, were unmoved by the christian narratives of the bible because their linguistic constructs didn't attach significance to events like the burning bush. Anyways, Dan eventually lost his religion, as well as the belief that there is an innate language facility that exists in all humans. This idea is so dominant because Noam Chomsky, in the mid 1950s, revolutionized linguistics with his research showing that all human languages have a recursive facility and are essentially the same. Dan Everett says that the Piraha people don't have that facility in their language, thus do not fit the Chomskian model of linguistics. Recursion, he says is just a cognitive ability that humans use in their language, but not an innate part of the human condition.

If he's right, this could be the next major revolution in linguistics (and thus, philosophy, computer science, etc). Here's the article (The Interpreter).

.9999... = 1

This took a bit of convincing at first. But after taking a look at the calculus, I understand and accept the argument. It's actually fun to look into why.

No, I'm Sorry, It Does.
'Why does 0.9999... = 1 ?'

This 'Funny Math' had me rolling.

'Math Every Day' was really interesting look at how John von Neumann impacted how we look at and use Math and Computer Science. What did I take from the article? Don't think sequentially(as in a Turing machine), think functionally (as in Lisp and Lamda math).

Weird Science

I picked up the latest issue of  science magazine "Seed".  It was funny... and also talked about a few things I've always thought. First, that we are fundamentally shaped by our surroundings and culture:
"THE REINVENTION OF THE SELF"

And getting laid is the ultimate goal in the quest for knowledge and power (for women too it seems):
"GETTING PHYSICAL"

The Infinite

Check out an article Cosmologist John D. Barrow wrote for the New Scientist (29 January 2005, Vol 185 No 2484), "How to do an infinite number of things before breakfast". If an infinity machine is possible, then all kinds of unprovable arithmetic propositions, or uncomputable problems can be solved in finite time.

In 1992, Jeff Xia of Northwestern University, showed that it might be possible to create an infinity machine. He took four particles of equal mass, arranged into two pairs with equal and opposite spin, in two parallel planes. A fifth, much lighter particle was introduced to move back and forth along a perpendicular plane through the mass centres of the two binary planes. Xia showed that the system of particles will expand to an infinite size in finite time. "These oscillations are performing an infinite number of physically distinct tasks in a finite time: a supertask."

Cool.