Random Thoughts

... Experiments unguided by an appropriate theoretical framework usually amount to little more than "watching the pot boil." - John Holland, "Complex Adaptive Systems", Daedalus 121:17-30 (1992) Read the feed:

Tangential Science: it's not necessarily science, but it's still funny. 1. Science of Karma  Can there be science to 'Karma'?   Likely not, since Karma is, by definition, an Eastern religious concept that has been colloquiallized into a philosophical one.    In the East (considered globally since  Hindus, Jains, Sikhs and Buddhists all lay claim to it), Karma is basically cause and effect, which is all very Newtonian, and it is echoed in Western religions with the 'as you sow, so also shall you reap' idea ... except at least in the West you are only screwed over once…

You have the same skin, same bones, the same meat. More importantly, when speaking about the mind, the essence of your good self, you have the same brain: the same neurons (more or less), the same synapses, the same blood vessels and connective tissue inside your skull. More profoundly, you have the same memories. And unless something alarming happens to you like an almighty thwack upon your head, you have the same impression of an unbroken continuum of consciousness. But the more you think about it, the more you realize you are not the same person you were even a second ago. You may be…

OK, I'm just going to say it.  Where was law enforcement? We have a registered sex offender, we have a neighbor reporting children on the property in November 2006, we have a parole violation in 1993 .... I guess the question is what does someone have to do to get law enforcement to pay attention? I've already heard the laments about how overworked the parole officers were, although what they were doing for 18 years requires a bit more explanation. The truth is that this was simply sloppy work and the fact that the neighbor's 911 call was handled by an interview on the porch instead of…

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances. - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Of The Understanding, Part 4 Read the feed:

Data on the distribution of wealth is apparently hard to come by directly, but inheritance tax data from the UK for some years is available.  This data, it turns out, can be well-fit by an exponential function, over most of the UK population [1].  That is, the probability of having w amount of wealth appeared to be proportional to exp(-w/T), for some constant T.  Income tax data from the US from 1983 through 2005 [1-5], the UK from 1994 through 1999 [1], and Australia from 1989 through 2000 [4] also followed an exponential curve.  It seems that poverty is most probable,…

"It is not who votes that counts, but who counts the votes"(From a sentence attributed to Josef Stalin) With a thought to Middle Eastern elections...

In 2007, advertisements talking about how much money you could make sitting on your butt if you would just BUY THEIR SECRET were at least interesting.     We got tales of people making obnoxious amounts of money selling stuff on the interwebs or flipping houses using a secret government auction list or whatever. Now look what we've come to ... even the spam marketers (somehow appearing in a remnant ad on our site, I must note, so remind me to find out who they are and eliminate them) have dialed it down. 4 figures a month?    They're getting people clicking their ads by…

Before blogs, writers could delusionally imagine great things about who was reading them: If you look at the traffic statistics for any newsish website you’ll see that people are reading when they’re supposed to be at work. Which means they’re multitasking. Which means they want short items. This reminds me that something I’ve come to understand in my years in the business is that probably the greatest privilege that writers for traditional magazines have is that nobody has any idea who’s reading them... But if you think about how magazines actually work, it’s really not like that. I…

While searching Scientific Blogging to make sure no one had written anything on a topic I'm about to undertake, I saw the following headline under the Science Codex bar on the bottom right of the screen:"New research examines how career dreams die" I half expected a picture of a crying teddy bear to pop up, maybe one of those ads for a lifetime movie starring Sally Field as the stalwart store clerk trying to encourage the down-and-out teen from the wrong side of the tracks to toss aside the crack pipe and take up brain surgery. What a downer. Darth Vader as a kid in a fast food joint, just…