It would be easier to discuss the merits (or lack) of the book if you specify something about the book you believe lacks merit. The opinion that the book is overly hyped is a common criticism, but is too vague to be refuted.
It was a bestseller. Of course many of those people who bought it are silly.
Here is another snip from the text. It is from lecture # 3 The great conservation principles.
“For those who want some proof that physicists are human, the proof is in the idiocy of all the different units they use for measuring energy.” (p 75 of the 1967 MIT press edition)
This is a question where fiction might give us more insight than fact. If you read realistic novels from the 19th century you will find right away that many of the characters are atheists or agnostics. The gold standard novel is War and Peace which contains only one overtly religious character (Maria Bolkonskaya) if I recall correctly. More than one of the characters is overtly atheist. Tolstoy could put this into fiction when his counterparts in the Physics department and the Philosophy department and the Political Science department would not dare to say it.
Do you have html for those documents? PDF is OK for me, but my guess is html is more openly accessible.
More references to Cannabis research.
Hard to come by because of the legal restrictions. The best sources I have seen:
Altered States of Consciousness edited by Charles Tart, 1969, Wiley.
Pharmako/Poeia by Dale Pendell, 1995, Mercury House.
They include pros and cons although it is obvious both guys are at least a little more pro than con. From Pendell’s book: “Smoking it occasionally makes you wise; smoking it a lot turns you into a donkey.” (p.199)
neural irregularities as pink noise, which is also called 1/f noise
A few minutes of fooling around with a color tool will show you that the spectrum of pink is flat (white) with a notch at the green and the 1/f spectrum is brown, nothing at all resembling pink. The misnomer of pink to label 1/f seems to come from a misconception that flat + a pole at red is pink (it’s not—it’s red) and 1/f (it’s not—it’s flat with a pole at red).
It is a pity this idea has gotten so much traction into the English language as it is so horribly wrong. It’s like one of those things that Pauli would describe as “not even wrong.”
Thank you for the link to Silver’s piece. I followed 538 in 2008 but I had not looked at it in awhile. Obviously .9 is far too high.
The Super Bowl will not be Packers over Patriots in February 2012.
P=~.8 (80%)
Obama will win in November 2012.
P=~.9 (that is ninety percent!)
I am reminded of an essay by the Anthropologist Edmund Leach, ‘Once a Knight is Quite Enough’ (p. 194ff in The Essential Edmund Leach Volume I 2000 Yale U. Press) where he details the parallels between his initiation into British knighthood by Q. Elizabeth II and a Borneo headhunter ceremony which he saw at the end of WWII. Headhunting was illegal at that time in Sarawak, but they got special permission as the two victims were Japanese soldiers. Anyway the idea was if you watched a silent movie of the two ceremonies and ignored the costumes, the two rituals were nearly indistinguishable. He also mentioned that the Sarawak ceremonial grounds were laid out like a typical English village church.
Here is a link to the headhunters ritual map from google books
I signed up.
I am mostly interested in this part: links to recordings and analysis of the relevant Bach pieces.
(My music skills are poor and that part of the book was a little over my head.)
Here is the link to the freakonomics post for those interested. I thought it was OK. You might also be interested in the works of Bill James. Bill James was doing freakonomics and cognitive bias analysis back in the early 1980′s, selling his Bill James Baseball Abstract self-published to a list of subscribers gathered by word-of-mouth. He is the man most responsible for the state of modern Major League Baseball statistical analysis—the emphasis of On Base Percentage, the de-emphasis of pitchers’ Won-Loss totals and a number of other changes and innovations.
I tried to argue in this post that the collection of large numbers of baseball player performance statistics and the incessant analysis towards meaning and reliability of them by fanatics make them as good a raw data set on human performance we have anywhere. The prediction accuracy of Las Vegas sports bookmakers may well be the singular most successful prediction market anywhere at anytime.
A similar idea but taken a little farther.
(Tutorial: How to make hip hop hits by boyinaband)
The bio guys I know thought doing and publishing this research was important because it underscores the hazard of factory pig and cattle farms. This experiment (they tell me) is ongoing without controls all over the globe. (I am not a biologist.)
Inside your google doc is a link to another google doc with “Strengths Finder” as the label which is restricted access. Is that from a publicly accessible aptitude test?
Did a physician inform you about the sleeping-on-side hack?
I personally know of an instance where a person had gastric reflux, went to the doctor, was prescribed a proton pump inhibitor as the sole treatment (Nexum), didn’t get any better, went poking around the internet with google, and got non-medicine lifestyle adjustments (elevated bed head, fasting for five hours before bedtime) to fix their reflux problem. Then, later they told the doctor, who said nothing but “oh yeah”.
We had no google in 1988 although surely some futurist genius somewhere foresaw it.
This might interest you.
Fair question, but not an easy one to answer.
I signed up for the reading group along with the 2600 Redditors. It was previously posted about here. The book is an entry point to issues of Artificial Intelligence, consciousness, cognitive biases and other subjects which interest me. I enjoy the book every time I read from it, but I believe I am missing something which could be provided in a group reading or a group study. As I stated in the previous thread, I am challenged by the musical references. The last time I read music notation routinely was when I sang in a choir in middle school; many of the Bach references and other music references to terms such as fugue, canon, fifths & thirds, &c are difficult for me to grasp.
If one of those 2600 redditors felt moved to build some youtube tutorials with a bouncing ball along and atop the Bach scores illustrating Hofstadter’s arguments, then I presume many others besides myself would enjoy seeing them.
Have you seen that Feynman video where he says he usually dislikes answering “why” questions? If not that, perhaps that Louis C. K. standup routine where he talks about his daughter asking “why?” It is a discussion prompt but it often does not point to anywhere. I have that feeling now that I am rambling.