we’re all made of math

January 25th, 2013 § Comments Off on we’re all made of math § permalink

English: Math is prerequisite to Ontology. Mat...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

reading a great summary of 17 equations that changed the world. great stuff, go check it out.

I love how each of these formulas captures en entirety of a part of our world into a simple 2-d graphic 🙂

however, there is one formula missing here, a rather important one. it’s an equation, that sums it all, well, almost everything. everything that we could have summed up so far in the history of science. the grand, unified theory of everything.

GUT is a theory that connects three of the four forces that shape our world. Only gravity is missing in this connection, before we can claim we really can model the world. and my mind was blown when i first realized that we can write it up into a single page-long formula. here it is, in all it’s glory.

What was the most common phrase in English 500 years ago? [Linguistics]

August 17th, 2012 § 3 comments § permalink

We live in amazing times – in a couple of years, we will have digitized all books every published (that survived), and we will be able to apply machine learning to the past. It will spur a whole new era of historiography.

What was the most common phrase in English 500 years ago? [Linguistics]

#linguistics With millions of books scanned and digitized by Google, a new type of linguistic analysis has become possible – as people are able to delve into hundreds of years and millions of books’ worth of data.

via: io9.com

… that the research has been done by a fellow Slovenian is not a coincidence – lots of talent over here 😉

People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say – Yahoo! News

March 2nd, 2012 § 1 comment § permalink

Betonwerksteinskulptur "Lehrer-Student&qu...

Image via Wikipedia

now this is just stupid:

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,”

news.yahoo.com

my favorite primary school teacher once told us: “if you really understand the subject, you are able to explain it to anyone and at their level.” it has proven to me to be true over and over again in my life.

so all this ‘study’ might be saying, is that our beloved politicians are not smart enough to explain their ‘good ideas’. which is exactly why we need to replace them with a more directly democratic, hopefully crowd-sourced system.

if you simply assume that the current election systems are perfectly ‘democratic’, and you don’t like the result, that doesn’t mean that the voters are stupid, but that the system promotes other ‘qualities’ that good ideas.

meh.

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