If you’re a person of some means who wants to make a charitable donation to make the world a better place you have a lot of options available to you. And one of the very worst things you could do with that money is give it to a fancy university. If you’ve specifically decided that [...]
When we find a society in history where human beings didn’t fuck in just about every possible configuration fucking imaginable, we’ll be in the presence of a real anomaly.
The doctrine that we could not perceive the world around us unless we already had the concept of space is nonsense. It is quite the other way around: We could not conceive of empty space unless we could see the ground under our feet and the sky above. Space is a myth, a ghost, a [...]
Today is my third wedding anniversary. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by quoting from today’s ruling by Judge Walker: The right to marry has been historically and remains the right to choose a spouse and, with mutual consent, join together and form a household. Race and gender restrictions shaped marriage during [...]
True or False: acting is more difficult than perceiving. UPDATE: Again with the comically vague questions — that’s sort of how my mind works (or starts working). Anyway, to get a bit more specific, imagine you need to teach a humanoid robot 1) how to move and act in the world and 2) how to understand what it [...]
What is an object? UPDATE: This is such a general question, I thought it might be worth providing a specific example. In the dominant paradigm of computer vision research, an object is an array of pixels with a particular label. The main research challenge is identifying some model that explains the variations in pixel arrays [...]
Heffernan’s critique of ScienceBlogs hits the nail on the head for me: Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that’s not [...]
My ability to decide how I feel about Wikileaks’ activities is totally annihilated by my ongoing realization that it cannot possibly be real. It’s a plot device in a near-future thriller novel. I mean, seriously, semi-stateless man with an unusual appearance uses an army of anonymous allies to expose governments’ secrets, and posts an insurance [...]
From a surprisingly erudite interview on the movie Inception: The problem for me is that you’re using negative evidence to support a story that isn’t there. I don’t know what to say about a character who only exists before and after the movie. You’re talking about a character who isn’t on screen. And I mean [...]
So depressing: I have no trouble saying with a straight face that habitual cheating in subjects where knowledge is concrete, technical and cumulative will eventually have disastrous consequences for the cheater. When it comes to writing or humanistic knowledge? Well, there’s more than a few professors who’ve gotten away with plagiarism in the last decade, [...]