Things were invented near Uppsala, Sweden and spread mainly westward all the way to Greenland (about 1000 CE).
A little while ago, I was talking to someone about about AI futurism stuff, and it seemed like we disagreed about how to interpret fast progress in deep learning. The other person thought that since deep learning has been moving fast, it’s plausible that it will continue to move fast, and so [some challenging problem] is likely to be solved soon, even if it looks hard to us. (Because similarly hard-looking problems have been overcome in short succession in the recent past – that’s why we say the field is moving fast.)
I was wary of this, in part because I wasn’t sure that “many challenges overcome in a short time” actually meant the field was moving fast. Even if discovering were just happening at some constant rate, we’d see some “clusters” like that. This is the sort of possibility that one should always keep in mind explicitly, because our brains seem bad at accounting for it (the “clustering illusion”).
In other words, I had a “null model” in mind that was just a Poisson process. And I wanted to know whether the appearance of clustering (“the pace is fast now”) could just be explained away by this null model.
This seems like the sort of thing that would have been studied, right? I’ve seen people ask this question in other places: Lewis Fry Richardson studying a data set on war and peace and finding no more clumpiness than a Poisson process (see this fascinating article); R. D. Clarke showing the same about WWII German bomb targets in London; Shalizi and others on the clumpiness of British novel genres. And the nature of scientific progress is a really important thing, so surely someone must have asked the same question about scientific advances?
Yet I couldn’t find anything on Google Scholar. Everything I could find was by (or about) one researcher, who mostly studied rate of discoveries by an individual across their lifespan, rather than rate of discoveries by a field. Anyone know of sources on this?
A murder with a
single victim is magnitude 0 (since 10^0 = 1).
Al MacKinnon taught psychology for 20 years at the University College of the Cariboo before being “outed” by the vigilant PC movement. He now starves and writes bad verse in a lakeside cabin in the interior of British Columbia.
Anonymous asked: Forreal tho, any philosophy that goes out of its way to assure its followers that they are broken, depraved, and incapable of wholeness or morality unless they follow that specific philosophy is incredibly suspicious. And I am extremely uncomfy with the thought of teaching kids to give weight and guilt to every little kid "wrong" they do so they can be absolved to save themselves from eternal torment, that is super gross indoctrination.
it’s certainly a red flag among many.
actual true story: i remember physically shaking in my first confession, i was six and the worst thing i confessed was “making a joke that implied all americans are stupid.”
two decades later i find out the priest i confessed to literally did this (tw csa):
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/abuse-priest-alexander-bede-walsh-jailed-for-22-years-7547222.html
those poor boys.
trust nobody who sets himself up as teaching you about morality.
it’s like they always say: you can’t spell “nonlinear” without “online”
People often resort to the
philosophy “I do X … oh, and I also sometimes dabble
a bit with Y,” as the philosophy “I do X*Y,” where * denotes
something of the nature of an integral convolution,
has not been in favor since the Renaissance.
The zeitgeist of science and engineering in the twenty-first century is the integration of disciplines - that is, the bridging of the gaps between the formerly fragmented and distinct scientific disciplines, and the grappling with the many remaining grand challenge problems that lie at their intersection. There is thus an emerging need for educational institutions to distill and relate these scientific disciplines for the new generation of scientists who will ultimately accomplish their seamless integration. Towards this end, Professor Thomas Bewley has written Numerical Renaissance, which aims to provide a systematic, integrated, succinct presentation of efficient techniques for solving a wide range of practical problems on modern digital computers.
Ooh look at this cool numerics textbook with a publicly available draft version (PDF)
(N.B. I’ve looked over it for all of 30 seconds, could be terrible for all I know; just sounds like an unusually comprehensive and unified introduction to the subject)
Wait, why hasn’t anyone done “Catullus, but in the present day” yet? Like as a cable TV comedy/drama or something
He’s an accomplished writer, pioneer of a seductive new genre that’s about wit and frivolity and emotion instead of epic grandeur; a prankster known for his elaborate, extremely vulgar disses; beloved by the powerful – his a friendship with the head of state (Caesar) was strong enough to withstand his brutal mockery of the latter in print; and yet … he’s not happy! Why? He’s in love. With a married woman – wife of a powerful politician. Who’s not as into him as he is into her. And boy is he into her – this formidable, urbane, rapier-witted man, reduced to quivering jelly by thought of his Lesbia
Guys the TV show writes itself
I couldn’t think of a way to smoothly weave this in to the preceding post, but: “modern Catullus as rapper” is the obvious angle here. We’ve got a non-stuffy modern poetic tradition in which the poetae novi stuff is right at home (first person, braggadocio, writing about one’s personal life, sex and vulgarity) – it even has invective as a recognized sub-genre (diss tracks)! And, if we’re considering practicalities here, it’d be totally trendy in the wake of Hamilton, right?
(The tough part would be what to do with the political connections)
(via nostalgebraist)