The Longest Now

Hooke liked to note discoveries he had made before he had found time to exlpain and prove his discoveries.  He used the simple mechanich of anagramming an entire phrase:

The true Mathematical and Mechanichal form of all manner of ARches for Building, with the true butment necessary to each of them. A Problem which no Architectonick Writer hath ever yet attempted, much less performed. abcccddeeeeefggiiiiiiiillmmmmnnnnnooprrsssttttttuuuuuuuux

This code, not decrypted during Hooke’s life, was revealed on his death to anagram to: Ut pendet continuum flexile, sic stabit contiguum rigidum inversum — “As hangs a flexible cable, so inverted, stand the touching pieces of an arch”.  The modest original context follows; (more…)

…and when they make loose with a few orders of magnitude.

Rouder and Morey critique some recent work by Bem on “Feeling for the Future”:

“[O]ur assessment is that Bem’s experiments, collectively, provide some evidence of psi phenomena, but not enough to sway the beliefs an appropriately skeptical reader…

…There is [a] surprising degree of evidence for the hypothesis that people can feel the future with emotionally-valenced nonerotic stimuli, with a Bayes factor of about 40. Though this value is certainly noteworthy, it is several orders of magnitude lower than what is required to overcome appropriate skepticism of such implausible claims.”

The framing of the questions and hypotheses here is most amusing, and worth a read. Rouder’s face sums up this whole debate.

Hat-tip to Cassandra Vieten at HuPo.

Yet another Happy Meal rotting experiment, with a french fry workout.

It took me a while to realize what I was reading: an entire zine site – from featured stories to news blurbs and gossip sections to photosets and interviews – about celebrity charitable work. How, when, and why people give, third-party events recognizing different sorts of giving. Glossy coverage of civic events supporting the needy or arranging barn-raising and disaster recovery in towns around the world. Site polls about how visitors plan to help a homeless person in their neighborhood that day.

Somehow they pull this off in a sincere and heart-warming way. What say you?

http://www.tonic.com/

Awesome in at least three different ways.

A comment from Cursor’s Richard Nash, who is working on Red Lemonade, a site for group review of publishing submissions with heatmap-style annotation (rather than having publishers manage the review process). He gave a great talk about why authors should review one another’s work, and why we already live in a world where we all manage the meaningful review processes.

Space monkey + Billiards = Space Billiards. Next NY trip, I am so there.

Luke Ford is the most bizarre person I’ve come across in a long time.  (Update, 2012: still is!)  Reading his personal journal suggests he is a cross between Andy Kaufman, Sam Sloan, and Woody Allen… with a pinch of dissociation and a journalists reflection on his own life journey.  The characters he writes about one believes are all being quoted and transcribed verbatim.

// I believe in chocolate,” she says. “And not much else. It’s definitely pretty scary.//

What seem to be entire unedited photosets of his (many different versions of each portrait) have been uploaded to Commons. When does a photographer sharing their photos cross the line from “publishing productively to the Commons” to “using Commons as a personal photo hosting service”? Do we want to duplicate Flickr’s functionality for any freely-licensed images, and if so, what will that end up costing? Flickr already hosts many times the current Commons capacity in CC-BY and CC-SA photos, this would be a significant shift in our use of infrastructure.

I happen to have come across Ford’s work because he has a large personal category on Commons, and was linked from a discussion of controversial content; are there other photogs (with other topical focus) who also have thousands of their own photos there?

Checking out what Tumblr does right and wrong: I posted a short series of meditations on joy, sharing and knowledge. Let me know what you think.

While still recovering from a Rein’s Deli hangover, I found myself the subject of the Ragesoss lens last weekend.   Good energy, well captured.

@Ragesoss: It is a mathematical notion applied to ideas. A conceptual space around a theme is full of different concepts, each related to the theme in some way. Such a space can be described in terms of facets that can be used to describe a concept: for instance, you might describe ideas for laying out a garden in terms of their complexity, suitable climate, or total size… or many others. Complexity and size are sometimes linked. You can imagine the conceptual span of a set of facets, or their dependency on one another, as corrolaries of the span and independence of vectors being used as the basis for an abstract space.

A mesh is a limited set of elements that can be used to effectively describe an infinite space of ideas.  Human languages are full of concept meshes.  The easiest to discuss are one-dimensional meshes (ideas that span the spectrum of a single facet):

• color words – the spectrum of visible colors is split into a set of common colors.  this set of names is a casual mesh for the visible color spectrum. (casual in that there is no explicit metric used to determine whether all parts of the visible spectrum are ‘equally’ represented by words)
• shape words – shapes may be described as circular or oval, square or rectangular.  There is a humorous ‘proof’ that the only skew triangle has angles (45, 60, 75) – that all others are roughly equilateral, isoceles, or right.

Higher-dimensional meshes include texture words (smooth, rough, bumpy, prickly, soft, firm, sticky… – covering facets of friction, give, tangible local structure, and more).  Most higher-dimensional meshes in language are incomplete (we rarely form words for concepts whose realizations are not in common use).

If you define a metric for the distance between two points on a spectrum, you can construct an “equally-spaced” subdivision of the space, or a balanced mesh.  This splits a space into a set of characteristic elements (here, concepts) or nodes which can be used to describe anything elsewhere in the space.

Choosing a metric is important and difficult.   For instance, once we found a way to measure color by the wavelength of its light, we could ask for enough common color words such that every frequency of visible light is no more than 50nm from the wavelength of one of the characteristic colors.  In practice, humans see different parts of the color spectrum with differing degrees of sensitivity, and we become familiar with certain constant colors in our environment .  So while the rendered spectrum does not devote much space to Yellow or Orange (in contrast with green and red), we have many more characteristic words for yellows and blues than a straight “wavelength subdivision” would suggest.

It is also difficult to define facets that are independent of one another; but this is not necessary.  It is mainly important for each facet to be easy to observe and agree on.

For a given metric, you can describe the fineness of a mesh in terms of the maximum distance from any concept to the closest characteristic element.  (or sometimes twice that distance – as a description of the “largest” concept that could “slip through” the mesh without including any of the characteristic elements.)  If you have different metrics for each facet, a synthetic combined metric must be created that is consistent with each.

A balanced mesh is then one in which the fineness of the mesh is essentially the same for all subsets of the conceptual space — so, a set of color words that provides equal facility in describing perceived colors at all points on the color spectrum.   (Again, a suitable metric here might be one that stretches out the spectrum in regions perceived very well by the human eye, or colors that come up frequently in human life — the latter a metric that changes with social context.)

One can often have a clear definition of a mesh without having words for some of its characteristic elements.   This happens often with a multifaceted space, where the intersection of well-known values of each facet is an unknown combination that has no word to describe it.   One common way of constructing a balanced mesh involves creating a balanced mesh for each facet, and then defining a concept for every combination of those single-facet ideas.  Building a “complete” set of characteristic concepts can be thought of as mesh completion.  It is a way of thoroughly grokking a space of related concepts.  And the fineness of the resulting mesh is a measure of how effectively one has used language, imagery, or other methods to illustrate the limitless variety possible within the constraints of that conceptual space.

(More after the jump…) (more…)

So I watched the full moon as it passed overhead, and the day and then full noon the next, from my bed.
I drank nothing and ate less, drifting in a certain breeze, considering the pressures of similarity and conservation of novelty in large societies. When I stirred from the warmth I could name the new field that the study of these sorts of patterns would yield, and sounded its depth and its length. And found the first challenges, boundless and bright, shared by the world and as clear as night, waiting to be coalesced into sight, that required the finesse of its strength.

Take a peek, you’ll enjoy the view. The presentation of the Book of Odes is particularly delightful. It is said that the great classics should be read a thousand times over before they are truly internalized… and that presumes a familiarity with the language to begin with.

Not papers, but still: Wow. (The Guardian on Wikileaks; later picked up by most major media) Wikileaks is now a bona fide cultural phenomenon, discussed seriously by political, military, and academic leaders.

And to think I made fun of the logo when it came out.

At TED Global. (The original Zuck, of course.)

This new reality show from Malaysia looks amazing. I would go out of my way to watch this sort of show for any religion whatever. (The Frum and the Restless didn’t do it for me. But if you have another amazing reality show that captures real life, let me know.) The winner of the show is sponsored to take the Hajj, and has a chance to lead services for a famous congregation in Kuala Lumpur.

UPDATE: Here’s a YouTube video trailer of the show.

This is elemental art. (epilogue)

I sconded with a few amusing poems the other day in A Matter of Antics, to ensure that stellation of wordplay is preserved and highlighted for the long now — something along the lines of my older post on the perils of English pronunciation, Concordant Chaos.  If you have a few moments, both are worth a read.  See also the Language Log for ling.