Hard to define…
It’s very easy for discussions to get hung up on definitions, so a serious approach to debating a subject begins with synchronizing everyone’s vocabulary watches. Accurate and nuanced communication requires mutually understood ideas and terminology for expressing those ideas.
Yet some concepts seem almost impossible to define clearly. The idea of “consciousness” is notorious for being a definition challenge, but “morality” or “justice” or “love” are also very difficult to pin down. At the same time, we seem to share mutual basic intuitions of these things.
So the question today is: why are some concepts so hard to define?
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10 Comments | tags: Bruce Cockburn, configuration space, definitions, reductionism, words | posted in Basics
I’ve written about configuration spaces before. I plan to use the notion in some upcoming posts, so this seems like a good time for a refresher. (If you’re new to the idea, I recommend that you read at least the first post in the series. The third one might be a helpful read, too.)
Today I’ll talk about a configuration space where the axes consist of personal taste and objective quality. Which obviously implies there is such a thing as objective quality. I think there is, and I’ll try to make a case for it. (Production quality certainly offers objective metrics.)
Of course, as everyone knows, there is no accounting of personal taste.
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16 Comments | tags: parameter space, Shakespeare, social mores | posted in Basics
I watched the first season of The Feed (2019), a British SF-horror series on Amazon Prime. I can’t say I was terribly whelmed by it. By the time I watched the last two episodes (of ten) I was mostly kinda over it. It has some neat ideas, but far too many tropes and cliches.
Full disclosure, I am not generally much of a horror fan. As with fantasy, I need a bit of something special — original — in my horror (like alien face-huggers or alien trophy hunters). Ordinary horror stories (especially outright slasher flicks), or, for that matter, ordinary Medieval magic fantasy stories, just don’t make the cut.
The problem I had with The Feed was finding it pretty ordinary.
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6 Comments | tags: Amazon Prime, science fiction, science fiction TV, SF, television | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Expert Logician
For a little Friday Fun I have a logic puzzle for you. I’ll give you the puzzle at the beginning of the post, detour to some unrelated topics (to act as a spoiler barrier), and then explain the puzzle in the latter part of the post. I would encourage you to stop reading and think about the puzzle first — it’s quite a challenge. (I couldn’t solve it.)
The puzzle involves an island with a population of 100 blue-eyed people, 100 brown-eyed people, and a very strange social practice. The logic involved is downright nefarious, and even after reading the explanation, I had to think about it for a bit to really see it. (I still think it’s twisted.)
To be honest, I’m kinda writing this to make sure I understand it!
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21 Comments | tags: Daniel Craig, George Lazenby, James Bond, logic, logic puzzle, NASA, Pierce Brosnan, Randall Munroe, Roger Moore, Sean Connery, Terry Tao, Timothy Dalton | posted in Math
If you keep an eye on the night sky you may have noticed two bright “stars” to the south just around midnight. (To be precise: Jupiter is dead south at 11:02 pm; Saturn is dead south at 11:37 pm. By midnight they’ve moved slightly to the west.)
If you’re the type to keep an eye on the night sky, you likely already know those “stars” are Saturn (on the left) and Jupiter (on the right). What you may not know — and certainly can’t see — is that almost right smack dab between them is the former planet Pluto. All three just happen to be lined up nicely right now.
The New Horizons spacecraft is also out there, well beyond Pluto.
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4 Comments | tags: astronomy, Jupiter, NASA, New Horizons, planet, Pluto, Pluto is amazing!, Saturn, solar system, space, space exploration | posted in Science
I recently read Animal Wise: How We Know Animals Think and Feel (2013) by Virginia Morell, correspondent for science and contributor to National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other publications. She’s author of several books including Wildlife Wars (2001), which she co-authored with Richard Leakey.
Morell takes us on a tour of current research into the minds of animals, starting with ants and working up through various species to our primate relatives. Dear to my heart, she reserves the last chapter for our best friends, dogs.
I found it a wonderful exploration with some real eye-openers.
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35 Comments | tags: animals, dogs, ethology, Virginia Morell, W.G. Sebald | posted in Books
There are many kinds of “comfort food” we resort to, from actual food — pizza always seemed a good choice in my view — to all the other distractions we use to give ourselves a bit of relief from the stresses of life. (Of course, that sort of thing can become addictive, but that’s another topic.)
Books have been a life-long escape to joy for me. Some are educational, and I love learning new things, but I think the best escape comes from fiction, and especially those fictions with long-running characters — people one comes to know. Sherlock Holmes, for example, is someone I’ve known for over 50 years.
And so are Hercule Poirot and Perry Mason.
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20 Comments | tags: Agatha Christie, Captain Arthur Hastings, Erle Stanley Gardner, Hercule Poirot, John Watson, Nero Wolfe, Perry Mason, Raymond Burr, Rex Stout, Sherlock Holmes | posted in Books, Mystery Monday
Way back when (over eight years ago!) I shared a picture of some wild hail. Last night another big boomer passed through the Twin Cities, and the hail was the biggest I’ve personally yet experienced:
Some folks apparently got baseball-sized hail. (I saw a picture in a local news article — hail stone side by side with a baseball. That would do some serious damage. The stones I was getting were plenty loud as it was!)
I just had to step outside (in my underwear) and grab a few of the bigger ones. Stuck them in my freezer. Maybe I’ll actually put them in a soda or something. (Or just take them out and admire them once in a while.)
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For a couple of hours, it was quite a lightning show. No major ground strikes around me (and thankfully no power outages like a few weeks ago). I do love it when the lightning never stops — constant electrical activity!
I just love weather!
Stay safe, my friends! Wear your masks — COVID-19 is airborne!
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4 Comments | tags: hail, hail stone, rain storm, thunder storm | posted in Life
Synchronicity pops up a lot in my life. Between working on drafts about my disappointment with a science fiction series, I took a break to read my news feed and saw an article asking why so many popular SF TV series are so awful. The article made a number of points that resonated a lot with me.
The article calls out Westworld (season three), Star Trek: Picard, and Devs, as examples of awful science fiction television, which seems to match what I’ve read. By which I mean, just about everything I’ve heard, both negative and positive, doesn’t incline me towards these shows (I might check out Devs at some point).
Unfortunately, I don’t think the author answered the question.
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20 Comments | tags: Gene Roddenberry, science fiction, science fiction TV, SF, Star Trek | posted in Sci-Fi Saturday, TV
Hooray!
Baseball is back (but kinda weird), and my Minnesota Twins are off to a very good start. After eleven games, they have a 9-2 record (.818), and they’re the number two team in the American League. (The bad news is that our long-time nemesis, the damn Yankees, are number one.)
It’s going to be a very short season (60 games rather than 162) with an extended postseason — just over half the 30 teams (16, rather than the usual 10) will get at least one postseason game. And, of course, none of it is being played in front of fans.
Just one more aspect of our COVID-19 world.
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15 Comments | tags: Minnesota Twins, Target Field, Twins 2020 | posted in Baseball
Logos con carne 