Archive for January, 2011

Mind Crunch 1.4.11

Frank Sulloway once said: "Ninety-nine per cent of what Darwinian theory says about human behavior is so obviously true that we don't give Darwin credit for it. Ironically, psychoanalysis has it over Darwinism precisely because its predictions are so outlandish and its explanations are so counterintuitive that we think,AIs that really true? How radical! Freud's ideas are so intriguing that people are willing to pay for them, while one of the great disadvantages of Darwinism is that we feel we know it already, because, in a sense, we do."

Suppose you find an unconscious six-year-old girl lying on the train tracks of an active railroad. What, morally speaking, ought you to do in this situation? Would it be better to leave her there to get run over, or to try to save her? How about if a 45-year-old man has a debilitating but nonfatal illness that will severely reduce his quality of life - is it better to cure him, or not cure him?

.:singinst.org->

email

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:51pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: mind crunch

Comments: No comments


The word isomorphism comes from the Greek iso - meaning same, and morphos - meaning shape. Most commonly used in mathematics, the term refers to a correspondence or relationship between two (or more) discrete patterns. To say that A and B are isomorphic is to say that there are elements or features of A that map onto B, even though A and B may appear quite different in many respects.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:44pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: the column

Comments: No comments


Serendipity is my new favorite English word. It’s when good fortune comes your way in an unexpected manner. A happy accident. It is always pleasant, always unanticipated. Now, because of the undeterministic nature of serendipity you migh think that there’s nothing to do to facilitate it, but you’d be wrong.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:41pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: the column

Comments: No comments


Kuhn baptizes his famous notion of a scientific "paradigm" as originating from the "great works" of science, like Copernicus's De Revolutionibus or Newton's Principia. These great works became paradigms because they were "sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity," and "sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve." The activity spurred by such great books goes by the name of "normal science." "There are … only three normal foci for factual scientific investigation."

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:35pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: the column

Comments: No comments


Apart from those and other oddities Venus is probably going to be a lovely place to live in. Wonderful mountains and valleys to travel around as a tourist and more solar power then you could ever use to charge every single device from electric cars and high speed trains to super efficient airliners and even artificial planetary or local magnetic fields. In my view, the best way to make terraforming Venus a reality would be through a multinational corporation set up by most or all of the Earth nations. The biggest problem that the project needs to overcome, both for the self replicating nanobots and later the colonists, would be water shortage. But I believe that this is not an insurmountable problem. In all likelihood, there will be other problems that I have not thought of or mentioned here so feel free to contribute to this idea.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:20pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: the column

Comments: No comments


History of Thermo Electricity

YouTube Preview Image

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 4th, 2011
at 3:14pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: science

Comments: No comments


Rise of the Reputation Score

Back in May, David Streitfeld wroteAthis article about how, and why, people in the US aren't paying their mortgages.A While it was one of the most troubling articles I have read in a long time, since then, I have spoken with a lot of people who think it's crazy to make mortgage payments these days.AA The thinking is that it takes at least two years to foreclose, and when they do foreclose, the house will be sold at auction for a fraction of the cost, and if people have the money, they can pay cash for the house and not need another mortgage and have saved a lot of money.

But as I thought through that, I realized that it meant that people don't care what their credit rating is.A If just about anyone can get a credit card, which seems to be the case, then it starts to look like the credit score the some of us have worked so hard to keep high, is starting to matter less and less in transactions.A I realize it's not quite that simple, but the trend is hard to deny, or ignore.

So just as the once sacred credit rating is now becoming junk, it's not so surprising that a different way to judge us is emerging.A The "reputation score" -A that is, how trustworthy we are to participate in a particular transaction.

: Continue reading the article :

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 3rd, 2011
at 5:54pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: business

Comments: No comments


Alone in Tokyo

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 3rd, 2011
at 5:38pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: film

Comments: No comments


"How long is the sales cycle" starts to get at the maturity of the business as well as if it is a revenue generating company or a startup in search of a business model. Most are in search of a business model. The search for a business model is one of the most difficult parts, hence an area most entrepreneurs get stuck, and go out of business if they don't break through.

Post to Twitter Post to Facebook

Posted: January 3rd, 2011
at 5:29pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: the column

Comments: No comments