My English Diet
I have eaten more packaged sandwiches since September than I had in the preceding 45 years.
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"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness
By
gcallah
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I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
In ancapistan, if you have no property, you have no rights
By
gcallah
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Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Gene, me mate, you may be interested in attending Simon's Brooklyn gig: http://secretscienceclub.blogspot.ca/2015/11/wednesday-december-2-8pm-secret-science.html
ReplyDeleteOh, but that was two days ago!
DeleteI'm a little behind, but that video reminded me of this old post:
ReplyDeletehttps://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2013/07/02/on-the-empire-of-the-ants/
"Theory: ants are smart, and they talk with their antennae. How smart are they, and how much information can they transfer with their antennae language?
Experiment: to figure out how much information they can transfer, starve some ants (hey, it’s for science), stick some food at random places in a binary tree, and see how fast they can tell the other ants about it... Each fork in the path of a physical binary tree represents 1 bit of information, just as it does on your computer. Paint the ants so you know which is which. When a scout ant finds the food, you remove the maze, and put in place an identical one to avoid their sniffing the ant trails or the food in it. This way, the only way for the other ants to find the fork the food was in is via actual ant communication. Time the ant communication between the scout ant and other foragers (takes longer than 30 seconds, apparently). Result: F. sanguinea can transmit around 0.74 bits a minute. F. polyctena can do 1.1 bits a minute.