Thursday, February 13, 2014
if only the cathedral could stop bellyaching, get off its ass, and find something useful to do...,
By CNu at February 13, 2014 15 comments
Labels: CSC as ESS , culture of competence , What IT DO Shawty...
Thursday, February 06, 2014
"regressive - grandparentish" - more cathedralish whining about the global system of strict-father supremacy
By CNu at February 06, 2014 43 comments
Labels: Cathedral , culture of competence , edumackation , Strict Father
Monday, February 03, 2014
where is the proof in pseudo-science?
By CNu at February 03, 2014 6 comments
Labels: culture of competence , What IT DO Shawty...
Wednesday, January 08, 2014
serious public intellectuals address the educated masses and bring serious heat
By CNu at January 08, 2014 9 comments
Labels: culture of competence , The Hardline
Monday, January 06, 2014
the dark side of emotional intelligence?
By CNu at January 06, 2014 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence , subliminal
Friday, December 27, 2013
in the first two minutes and the last two minutes - mishima shatters the fiction of the cathedral...,
By CNu at December 27, 2013 4 comments
Labels: culture of competence , The Hardline , The Straight and Narrow
Sunday, December 15, 2013
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
twelve conscious men working together CAN rule the world...,
It takes strong system-level pressure to shift the overall group norm from one stable state to another. That pressure can be in the form of either effective legislation or a shift embraced by a minimum critical mass of non-conformants and supported by generally available information. Fist tap io9.
By CNu at September 17, 2013 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence , Livestock Management
Friday, September 13, 2013
Stepin Fetchit and Muhammad Ali...,
By CNu at September 13, 2013 11 comments
Labels: culture of competence , Living Memory , Race and Ethnicity
it's all about strengthening the fourth...,
Interview Highlights
By CNu at September 13, 2013 8 comments
Labels: culture of competence , tactical evolution , What IT DO Shawty...
Monday, September 09, 2013
why it's vitally important to find something useful and valuable to do, and do it with excellence...,
By CNu at September 09, 2013 0 comments
Labels: common sense , culture of competence , What IT DO Shawty...
Friday, August 23, 2013
lockhart's lament
Everyone understands that poets, painters, and musicians create works of art, and are expressing themselves in word, image, and sound. In fact, our society is rather generous when it comes to creative expression; architects, chefs, and even television directors are considered to be working artists. So why not mathematicians?
Part of the problem is that nobody has the faintest idea what it is that mathematicians do. The common perception seems to be that mathematicians are somehow connected with science— perhaps they help the scientists with their formulas, or feed big numbers into computers for some reason or other. There is no question that if the world had to be divided into the “poetic dreamers” and the “rational thinkers” most people would place mathematicians in the latter category.
Nevertheless, the fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depend heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
So let me try to explain what mathematics is, and what mathematicians do. I can hardly do better than to begin with G.H. Hardy’s excellent description:
A mathematician, like a painter or poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
For example, if I’m in the mood to think about shapes— and I often am— I might imagine a triangle inside a rectangular box:
I wonder how much of the box the triangle takes up? Two-thirds maybe? The important thing to understand is that I’m not talking about this drawing of a triangle in a box. Nor am I talking about some metal triangle forming part of a girder system for a bridge. There’s no ulterior practical purpose here. I’m just playing. That’s what math is— wondering, playing, amusing yourself with your imagination. For one thing, the question of how much of the box the triangle takes up doesn’t even make any sense for real, physical objects. Even the most carefully made physical triangle is still a hopelessly complicated collection of jiggling atoms; it changes its size from one minute to the next. That is, unless you want to talk about some sort of approximate measurements. Well, that’s where the aesthetic comes in. That’s just not simple, and consequently it is an ugly question which depends on all sorts of real-world details. Let’s leave that to the scientists. The mathematical question is about an imaginary triangle inside an imaginary box. The edges are perfect because I want them to be— that is the sort of object I prefer to think about. This is a major theme in mathematics: things are what you want them to be. You have endless choices; there is no reality to get in your way.
On the other hand, once you have made your choices (for example I might choose to make my triangle symmetrical, or not) then your new creations do what they do, whether you like it or not. This is the amazing thing about making imaginary patterns: they talk back! The triangle takes up a certain amount of its box, and I don’t have any control over what that amount is. There is a number out there, maybe it’s two-thirds, maybe it isn’t, but I don’t get to say what it is. I have to find out what it is.
So we get to play and imagine whatever we want and make patterns and ask questions about them. But how do we answer these questions? It’s not at all like science. There’s no experiment I can do with test tubes and equipment and whatnot that will tell me the truth about a figment of my imagination. The only way to get at the truth about our imaginations is to use our imaginations, and that is hard work.
By CNu at August 23, 2013 0 comments
Labels: ability , culture of competence , open source culture , What IT DO Shawty...
Sunday, August 04, 2013
All behavior begins as unconscious -the product of contingencies of reinforcement. We share unconscious behavior with the other animals. Behavior becomes conscious when society gives us reasons to examine ourselves...,
By CNu at August 04, 2013 0 comments
Labels: common sense , culture of competence , ethology
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
folks gotta get that eudaimonic groove back...,
The sense of well-being derived from "a noble purpose" may provide cellular health benefits, whereas "simple self-gratification" may have negative effects, despite an overall perceived sense of happiness, researchers found. "A functional genomic perspective on human well-being" was published July 29 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Philosophers have long distinguished two basic forms of well-being: a 'hedonic' [hee-DON-ic] form representing an individual's pleasurable experiences, and a deeper 'eudaimonic,' [u-DY-moh-nick] form that results from striving toward meaning and a noble purpose beyond simple self-gratification," wrote Fredrickson and her colleagues.
It's the difference, for example, between enjoying a good meal and feeling connected to a larger community through a service project, she said. Both give us a sense of happiness, but each is experienced very differently in the body's cells.
"We know from many studies that both forms of well-being are associated with improved physical and mental health, beyond the effects of reduced stress and depression," Fredrickson said. "But we have had less information on the biological bases for these relationships."
By CNu at July 31, 2013 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence , What Now?
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Monday, May 27, 2013
Rossi won't tell you his secrets, but John lets you in on his - so help him get the glass!
By CNu at May 27, 2013 1 comments
Labels: culture of competence , gifts , The Straight and Narrow
Saturday, May 25, 2013
creating a STEM-based innovation lab in your crib...,
By CNu at May 25, 2013 0 comments
Labels: culture of competence , open source culture , People Centric Leadership , truth
Wednesday, May 22, 2013
eusociality, mooc intelligence sorting, geolocation and climate change....,
- People want and need environmental information like never before;
- Demand coupled with new technologies and resources will enable access and application of that data and information like never before; and
- With personal, economic, and national security interests driving the use of that information, new policy and legal issues will arise like never before.
By CNu at May 22, 2013 13 comments
Labels: cultural darwinism , culture of competence , What Now?
Tuesday, May 07, 2013
survival of the nicest?
By CNu at May 07, 2013 2 comments
Labels: culture of competence , tactical evolution
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