isomorphismes

I don’t wanna grow up by Tom Waits (filmed by Jim...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:20 -0600

I don’t wanna grow up by Tom Waits

(filmed by Jim Jarmusch)

"As soon as an Analytic Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of..."

Thu, 16 May 2013 19:00:36 -0600

““As soon as an Analytic Engine exists, it will necessarily guide the future course of science.

Whenever any result is sought by its aid, the question will arise—By what course of calculation can these results be arrived at by the machine in the shortest time?””

- Charles Babbage (1864)

Once you’ve accepted that Pac Man takes place on a...

Wed, 15 May 2013 19:00:38 -0600

Once you’ve accepted that Pac Man takes place on a torus

you can extend the same trick to make higher-genus manifolds.

Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XXIII - Le sinthome, 1975 via...

Tue, 14 May 2013 19:00:18 -0600

Jacques Lacan, Séminaire XXIII - Le sinthome, 1975

via deuxetdeux

Brueghel, Tower of Babel via until a single soliton survives

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:00:00 -0600

Brueghel, Tower of Babel

via until a single soliton survives

"Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 15:33:00 -0600

“

Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate?

Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, one of many fashionable French ‘intellectuals’ outed….

”

- scientist and polemicist Richard Dawkins, Postmodernism Disrobed. A review of Intellectual Impostures published in Nature 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.

Above we read an assertion without evidence. Dawkins posits that an intellectual impostor with nothing to say would write in a certain way. But where’s the proof? I guess whoever’s reading this book review is assumed to already know what Dawkins (Sokal/Bricmont) are talking about and agree with his implications: namely, that postmodernists have nothing to say, and that they cultivate an obtuse literary style to obscure the fact (and that this somehow also attracts followers).

Who says “chances are”? Dawkins’ attack amounts to a flame.

Here is a not-unusual passage written in that other famously obtuse jargon, mathematics:

The prototypical example of a C*-algebra is the algebra B(H) of bounded (equivalently continuous) linear operators defined on a complex Hilbert space H; here x* denotes the adjoint operator of the operator x: H → H. In fact every C* algebra, A, is *-isomorphic to a norm-closed adjoint closed subalgebra of B(H)….

That’s from Wikipedia’s article on C* algebras. I think the language is similarly impenetrable to Guattari’s. But mathematics = science = good and humanities = not science = bad, at least in the minds of some.

Here is an excerpt (via @wtnelson) written for teachers of 4–12-year-olds, 40 years ago, by Zoltán Pál Dienes:

psychologically speaking, relating an object to another object is a very different matter from relating a set of objects to another set of objects. In the first case, perceptual judgment can be made on whether the relation holds or not in most cases, whereas in the case of sets, a certain amount of conceptual activity is necessary before such a judgment can take place. For example, we might need to count how many of a certain number of things there are in the set and how many of a certain number of these or of other things there are in another set before we can decide whether the first and the second sets are or are not related by a certain particular relation to each other.

Clear as mud! Clearly Z. P. Dienes was an intellectual impostor with ambitions to collect a coterie of reverent disciples.

I don’t know enough about postmodernism to opine on it. I just get annoyed when putatively sceptical people casually wave it off without proving their point.

(And if you’re going to point me to the Sokal Affair or Postmodernism Generator CGI, I’ll point you to At Whom Are We Laughing?.)

In Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide, Lionel Bailly describes his subject as “a thinker whose productions are sometimes irritatingly obscure”. He goes on:

Most Lacanian theory [comes from his] spoken teachings…developed in discourse with…pupils…. [Various modes of presentation which are appropriate in speech] make frustrating reading. …leading the reader toward an idea, but never becoming absolutely explicit…difficult to discover what he actually said…thought on his feet—the ideas…in his seminars were never intended to be cast in stone…freely ascribes to common words new meanings within his theoretical model…Lacan, despite the fuzziness of his communication style, strove desperately hard for intellectual rigour….at the end of the day, it is … clinical relevance that validates Lacan’s model. [Lacan being a psychoanalyst and his ideas coming out of that work.]

So there’s an alternative hypothesis from an authority. Bailly admits the communication style was poor and gives reasons why it was. But rather than judging the work on rhetorical grounds, we should judge it on clinical merit—the ultimate empirical test!

Compare this to Dawkins. Besides the suppositions I already mentioned, he chooses words like: “intellectuals” within scare quotes; ‘anoint’, ‘revere’, ‘coterie’—to undermine the intellectual seriousness of his targets. Who are the empiricists here and who relies on rhetoric?

"$150 billion per year is spent on text messaging. Recorded music is a $17 billion market Yearly box..."

Sun, 12 May 2013 11:33:00 -0600

“

$150 billion per year is spent on text messaging.
Recorded music is a $17 billion market
Yearly box office receipts are $32 billion
Video games $7 billion

(And the SMS market was created completely by accident.)

”

- Tom Standage of The Economist

"The definition of a hillbilly is someone who can solve their own problems. A rich person’s car..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 17:37:00 -0600

“The definition of a hillbilly is someone who can solve their own problems. A rich person’s car breaks down, they don’t know how to fix it. They rely on their money to get other people to solve their problems. A hillbilly has a problem, he figures out a way to solve it.”

- Mason Snyder,

IQ of 180

drives (and keeps in repair) a 33-year-old automobile

likes to set things on fire

shoots and eats rabbits, squirrels, and turtles

self-proclaimed hillbilly

by Garrett O. Hansen

Fri, 10 May 2013 20:30:18 -0600

by Garrett O. Hansen

Photo

Thu, 09 May 2013 20:30:08 -0600

What is Eastern Europe? How did places like Gepidia, Nitra,...

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:30:19 -0600

What is Eastern Europe? How did places like Gepidia, Nitra, Great Moravia, the Avar Khaganate, Habsburgia, Pannonia, Thrace, Dacia, Moesia, nomadic Göktürks under the Rouran Khaganate, Dalmatia, Cimmeria, Anatolia, the Great Seljuq Empire, Corinth, Onoghuria, Scythia, Syrmia, Vojvodina, Bulgaria, Carpathia, Illyria, Hamangia, Bosnia, Budim, Egri, Sigetvar, Temeşvar, Pomorje, Serbia, Arduba, Daorson, Ošanićia, Sarmatia, Čapljina, Ardea, Neretva, and Ossetia, in the middle of a continent that became socially dominated in the later half of the 2nd millennium A.D. by residents of its western islands and peninsulas, come to be seen as a “unified group” so that when an American visits Bratislava he expects something similar to Bucharest?

Anne Applebaum’s answer is that the present categorisation was essentially shaped by the USSR, a political powerhouse in Eurasia during the 20th century.

bonus: from Wikipedia, here are some notable biomes in the middle of the Eurasian supercontinent.

the steppe:

The Pannonian plain is divided into two parts along the Transdanubian Mountains (Hungarian: Dunántúli-középhegység). The northwestern part…and the southeastern part…comprise the following sections:

Western Pannonian Plain (province):
- Vienna Basin
- Little Hungarian Plain
Eastern Pannonian Plain (province):
- Great Hungarian Plain
- Pannonian Island Mountains (Serbian: Panonske ostrvske planine)
- Transdanubian Mountains (Hungarian: Dunántúli-középhegység)
- Drava–Mura lowlands

Note: The Transylvanian Plateau and the Lučenec-Košice Depression (both parts of the Carpathians) and some other lowlands are sometimes also considered part of the Pannonian Plain in non-geomorphological or older divisions.

Regions

Relatively large or distinctive areas of the plain that do not necessarily correspond to national borders include:

Bačka/Bácska
- Šajkaška
- Telečka
- Gornji Breg
Banat
- Pančevački Rit
- Veliki Rit
- Gornje Livade
Baranya/Baranja
Burgenland (Neusiedler Basin)
Crişana
Jászság
Kunság
Little Hungarian Plain (Kisalföld/Malá dunajská kotlina)
Mačva
Međimurje
Moravia
Moslavina
Podravina (around Drava river)
Podunavlje (around Danube river)
Pokuplje (around Kupa river)
Pomoravlje around Morava river
Pomorišje (around Mureş river)
Posavina (around Sava river)
Potisje (Serbia, around Tisa river)
Prekmurje
Semberija
Slavonia
- Palača
Srem/Srijem
- Podlužje
- Šokadija
- Spačva
Transdanubia
Vienna Basin
Vojvodina

"The critic who doesn’t make a personal statement, in re measurements he himself has made, is merely..."

Tue, 07 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

“The critic who doesn’t make a personal statement, in re measurements he himself has made, is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men’s results.

KRINO, to pick out for oneself, to choose. That’s what the word means.

No one would be foolish enough to ask me to pick out a horse or even an automobile for him.”

- from ABC of Reading by Ezra Pound (1934)

in re: reblogging via cmnotes

Sick Venus by Jacob Dudley

Mon, 06 May 2013 20:30:26 -0600

Sick Venus by Jacob Dudley

Population distribution of the United States in units of...

Sun, 05 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

Population distribution of the United States in units of Canadas.

(having a hard time locating the original source. if you can clue me in I’ll link to it!)

by Brendan C Smith via 0-0-0-0000

Sat, 04 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

by Brendan C Smith

via 0-0-0-0000

How I Use The Pythagorean Theorem Every Day

Fri, 03 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

OK, not every day. But whenever I shop for packaged retail goods like a coffee or in the grocers.

The Pythagorean theorem demonstrates that a slightly larger circle has twice as much area as a slightly smaller circle.

(Since the diagonal of that square is √2 long relative to the “1” of the interior radius=leg of the right triangle. So the outer radius=hypotenuse=√2, and √2 squared is 2.)

And some of us know from Volume Integrals in calculus class that a cylinder's volume = circle area × height — and something like a sausage with a fat middle, or a cup with a wider mouth than base, can be thought of as a “stack” of circle areas

or in the case of a tapered glass, a “rectangle minus triangle” (when the circle is collapsed so just looking at base-versus-height “camera straight ahead on the table” view).

The shell-or-washer-method volume integral lessons were, I think, supposed to teach about symbolic manipulation, but I got a sense of what shapes turn out to be big or small volume as well.

By integrating dheight sized slices of circles that make up a larger 3-D shape, I can apply the inverse-square lesson of the Pythagorean theorem to how real-life “cylinders” or “cylinder-like things” will compare in volume.

A regulation Ultimate Frisbee can hold 6 beers. (It’s flat/short, but really wide)
The “large” size may not look much bigger but its volume can in fact be.
Starbucks keeps the base of their Large cups small, I think, to make the large size look noticeably larger (since we apparently perceive the height difference better than the circle difference). (Maybe also so they fit in cup holders in cars.)

Finis Terrae by Norbert Schwontkowski via darksilenceinsuburbia

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

Finis Terrae by Norbert Schwontkowski

via darksilenceinsuburbia

16 pages for non-brainiacs on the Hopf fibration by David...

Wed, 01 May 2013 20:30:00 -0600

16 pages for non-brainiacs on the Hopf fibration by David Lyons

mapping from S³→S²
ƒ(a,b,c,d) = (a²+b²−c²−d²,,)
in general a linear transformation in 3-D requires 9 parameters (3×3 matrix — see general linear group)
but a rotation only requires ≤4 parameter
mapping from S³→S²
ƒ[a,b,c,d] = [a²+b²−c²−d²,2(ad+bc),2(bd−ac)]
but a rotation only requires ≤4 parameters
understanding maps from high-dimensional spheres to low-dimensional spheres is a Hard Problem
Gimbal lock, composition of rotation maps

to get the general three-angle rotation group

but this is ugly and wrong—not because there are too many trig words, but because if you play around with it enough you’ll see that—just like the North Pole and South Pole have redundant longitude coordinates—various combinations of [phi;,theta;,psi;] can overlap each other or even get caught in a Gimbal Lock.

Postmodern Economics I

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:44:00 -0600

Some people think of postmodernism as the rejection of the existence of objective facts. Another take is that po-mo comprises broader methods of getting one’s point across than didaction. For example: joking, insinuating, or ending sentences with question marks.

For example this sarcastic remark:

A theory is something which nobody literally believes except the person who invented it. An experiment is something which everybody literally believes except the person who invented it.

pokes fun at what a different conversational mode might wax about in general terms such as “human frailty” or “fallibility”—or sound like a stronger attack on the scientific method than it intends to be.

It’s natural to express scepticism when an expert or supposed expert disagrees with something that makes complete sense to you. (I owe ya a post called “The rigid rod of modus tollens & modus ponens”.) ”Says who?” is a sentence anyone can utter. You could view “the scientific method” as one way to respond to that criticism. But is it the only way?

Some (postmodern?) anthropologists and ethnographers begin their essays on people who are foreign to them by discussing their biases and where generally they’re coming from. Which may be a more appropriate response to scepticism with non-experimental data—a different way of addressing the same problem that repeatable double-blind experiments are supposed to, namely errors in judgment by the observer/researcher.

Economists have field-specific ways of addressing problems inherent to what they study. These include models, stylised facts, stating own biases, statistics, and rebuttals against the statistical analysis. But also self-questioning sarcasm. For example

The questions in economics never change. Only the answers do.

When we leave our closet, and engage in the common affairs of life, [reason’s] conclusions seem to vanish, like the phantoms of the night on the appearance of the morning; and ‘tis difficult for us to retain even that conviction, which we had attain’d with difficulty.

The Economics Nobel confers upon the laureate an appearance of expertise which in economics no one ought to possess.

I don’t think “a postmodern economics” needs to be “post-autistic” or revolutionary or hip in the ways I’ve seen suggested by heterodoxists. It could simply be the recognition that informal speech like sarcasm can be on the same level of importance as speeches, lectures, claims, statements, and pontifications.

Murray Gell-Mann became annoyed with Richard Feynman generating...

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 18:30:26 -0600

Murray Gell-Mann became annoyed with Richard Feynman

generating anecdotes or stories about himself
not brushing his teeth
not washing hands after urinating
“You’re just a salesman type. You’re just a normal person, not an independent thinker.”
purposefully cultivated outsider image. Feynman, you hipster!

(por Muon Ray)