nerd_stuff

Perhaps you should learn something from Kuhn and consider that attachment to your pet paradigm is holding you back.

When a scientist wants to build up the self-image of science they do the exact opposite of what you're suggesting. They use Newton as an example to prove that science is superior to the other disciplines he also practiced but bore no fruit.

> Relativity overturned Newtonian mechanics in the same way that Copernican cosmology overturned Ptotomeic cosomology.......So are these revolutions somehow categorically different?

They're so different that I'm surprised it's even a question. If anything the illusion of mind is bending them to fit a narrative.

When Relativity explained the precession of Mercury's perihelion the existing physics was off by 1/12,000,000th of Mercury's orbit (per orbit.) Not only was the Ptolemic system off by entire degrees (as opposed to arcseconds which are 1/3,600th of a degree) it was highly dependent on the position of the observer, if you stood on Jupiter I imagine the Ptolemic system would give you complete nonsense as to where the planets would be.

More importantly Newton's work has never been thrown out and you can derive classical mechanics as a special case of Relativity. You can also derive it from quantum mechanics. I don't believe you can show that the geocentric model of the solar system is a special case of the heliocentric model.

I've given you a corrective upvote.

I agree you need physics Newton never dreamt of for photocells. Explaining Mercury's precession was a big deal for Relativity as well. Out of curiosity, what's non-Newtonian in a rocket launch?

The General Sholium[0] was an addendum, not a set of corrections to The Principia. And what book doesn't have some corrections between the first and second edition?

> There are sociological reasons why students of science are not encouraged to read Newton for themselves.

Like what? Do you think physics teachers are afraid their students will find out Newton believed in God and then they won't be atheists? Do you think they're pushing materialism or "scientism" and rewriting history to that end? This is close to a conspiracy theory. I think you're ascribing malice or ill intent to what are almost purely pragmatic choices.

Here's the text of The Principia[1], read a few pages and imagine a physics student trying to make sense of it. When I finally opened it I found exactly what I had always been told I would find: something interesting but hard to read and not the best place to learn physics. I don't think there are any physics books today that prove the fundamentals of calculus in the middle of their discussion of physics. That's a pedagogical nightmare. Today you learn calculus and then you do physics with it, but Newton developed calculus to do physics so there were no calculus books he could assume his audience was already familiar with.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Scholium [1] - http://www.archive.org/stream/newtonspmathema00newtrich/newt...

Newton's scientific ideas, which are what matter here, remain largely untouched since they were published in the late 1600's. The fact that you'd resort to bringing up how little science focuses on his beliefs in things like numerology and alchemy doesn't bode well for the strength of Kuhn's work.

There's his scientific work which is widely available, and then there's his personal beliefs. I could really care less if we don't talk about his theology, but if you're accusing science of being dishonest about his mathematical and scientific contributions that's a claim which requires better evidence than you've provided.

You have a point but I forgot we were going back to Alchemy and before.

Phlogiston theory was overturned but the idea of oxygen is still standing strong despite the major advances in chemistry since 1773. Other puzzle pieces have been placed around it but they're additions to it. Even if the universe turns out to be a hologram the idea of oxygen will survive.

Once the big puzzle pieces are found they're rarely removed. Since the big shift towards empiricism most "revolutions" and paradigm shifts are happening in new areas or at different scales than the old ones. Much of what are being called revolutions I would call explorations of the unknown.

Am I the only one who read the article and thought the Whig interpretation was more accurate? The "revolution" of quantum mechanics didn't overthrow Newtonian mechanics, Relativity didn't either. They added to Newton's view and corrected it in a few places but to this day the first thing you learn in physics is Newton.

There was no revolution. Newton was right with the caveat that if things are very large, very small, or very fast things may look different. To this day if something disagrees with the core of what Newton said it's almost certainly wrong. The fact that the "paradigm shift" from deterministic to probabilistic left most of science untouched should show how paradigms aren't all that important. Quantum mechanics has multiple "paradigms" describing the exact same things and they're doing close to nothing in terms of pushing science forward, some think they're holding it back because so much time is spent arguing about them.

I don't think what Feynman said was any more belligerent than kicking an unwanted guest out of one's house.

Not to nitpick but because this is really cool: petrified wood is actually stone.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrified_wood

It's been a while but I'm pretty sure the spinning arrows are Phasors. Ironically the spinning arrows might make more sense than the math that describes them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasors

I think the title isn't overstated but awkward in a way that we're all translating it into an overstatement.

Between the quotes and not knowing what a language universal was I assumed they meant a universal language, apparently I'm not alone in this. The authors might write paper on this phenomenon next!

By the way if you ever want a great set of tools to play with language check out Python's Natural Language Toolkit: http://www.nltk.org/

I read it hoping to make a Lisp/Esperanto joke but alas, they only found one universal aspect of all languages, they did not find a universal language. The universal tendency is to bundle words together:

> You can see this effect by deciding which of these two sentences is easier to understand: “John threw out the old trash sitting in the kitchen,” or “John threw the old trash sitting in the kitchen out.”

If you design a city, and then design a slightly better or worse city, and repeat that process until every new modification only creates a worse city, is that not at least a locally ideal city evolved through design?

Twilight Princess takes 50+ hours to beat the first time and that's with being shepherded through by game mechanics. Even then a couple of things take forever to find.

I like what the author says but when you have to find something and you don't know what you're looking for you have to resort to a brute-force search. The original Zelda's overworld had 16x11=176 blocks per screen and was 16x8=128 screens. At a minute per screen that's two hours to do a rough exploration of the entire overworld. Twilight Princess is roughly four times the map size* and 8 hours looks like a long time to explore.

Compounding the problem is in the original Zelda a rock was pushable/not-pushable, a tree was burnable/not-burnable, a wall was bombable/not-bombable. That binary "I have checked this/I have not checked this" has largely disappeared. Not to mention 2-D vs 3-D.

Basically there is no fast Zelda Search Algorithm so either the game A) has a small map size, B) limits where the user needs to search, or C) takes forever.

*-http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/the-size-of-hyrule-area-co...

This book by James Scott has a very interesting perspective on the mapping of unmapped cities. The TL;DR is that an unmapped or unmappable city can't be managed from afar. In an unmapped city you must go there to manage it, in a mapped city you can sit at a desk a thousand miles away and know who's paid their taxes, etc. Paradoxically the act of mapping helps both outside help and outside exploitation.

http://www.amazon.com/Seeing-like-State-Certain-Condition/dp...

One derivation starts with E = mc^2, which is a special case of E^2 = m^2c^4 + p^2c^2 but with velocity set to zero. In the second equation if you instead set the mass to zero you get p = E/c (momentum equals energy divided by the speed of light) for massless particles.

The deeper reasons are above my pay-grade.

So they "build up" momentum out of nowhere? I think that just moves the breaking of conservation of momentum to a different place.

I'm glad they're testing this until it's proven one way or the other but if it somehow works I doubt that'll be the explanation.

From a glance I wouldn't expect this "western ceremonial magic" to bring anything but confusion and maybe the illusion of not-confusion. But if it works for you do your thing.

I've been around enough to reject the notion that an amalgamation of 1001 chemicals is fundamentally different from an amalgamation of 1000. With that goes the illusion of being "deep" while tripping balls. I'm not rejecting the intensity of the psychedelic experience, I'm rejecting the ideas that it's wholly unique in intensity, that it brings unique insight and that it reliably brings insight.

As far as meditation vs psychedelics I defer to people who have done enough of both to have informed opinions on the matter.

> Terence McKenna has literally volumes to say about this argument. So now that we've moved beyond this simpleton back-and-forth, what say you about his position vis a vis meditation?

If somebody makes a living telling people things like aliens brought us mushrooms and that's why evolution happened they aren't worth my time. They're too far gone. I responded to a comment on a message board encouraging people to not get excited about space exploration and instead focus on the wonders of DMT.

I simply don't care what he says about meditation.

> Specifically, what do you say about his argument that, without being willing to ingest a drug, you haven't humbled yourself to the basic notion that your brain is physical and its operations electrical and chemical?

Narcissistic, egocentric, closed-minded, a little horrifying. I don't understand why he thinks doing drugs is not only the best path but the only path to understanding the realities of being a human. That's how cult-leaders operate, they teach their followers there is no other way and everybody on the outside of their bubble just doesn't get it. Then when people try to help them get out they say "You just don't understand how great our leader is! He even said this would happen!"

In addition we live on a (mostly) 2-dimensional plane so we can't scale transportation capacity indefinitely, which means even if the roads were owned privately it's nearly impossible for a market to form that would force them to compete with each other.

Why? You can't build a close competitor to 9th Avenue (making up a street name) because A) there are buildings in the way beside it and B) building above it is prohibitively expensive. If these are one-way streets as is common in urban areas 9th Avenue's closest competitors are 11th and 7th and after that competition falls off quickly. Five competitors doesn't make a healthy market - it makes an oligopoly.

Neurochemistry and the experience of consciousness are very astonishing, I just think it's a bit egocentric to assume they're the most astonishing things in the universe.

> ...and it cannot be compared or described by anything else one has experienced in his/her life

Many long-term meditators who have previous experience with psychedelics would disagree with you.

I'm only making the assumption of agnosticism, that it's fundamentally impossible for you to know that something already within your realm of experience will trump all that exists in the unknown.

By all accounts NASA's getting ready to announce they've found an earth-like planet and you guys are like "yeah but I'm sure it won't compare the experience of taking my favorite drug." That's a sad and closed-minded way of looking at things.

It reminds me of Jon Stewart's character in Half Baked who thought everything was better "on weeeeed!" If your drug of choice prevents you from enjoying other experiences, like staring in wonder at the mysteries of the universe, that's like being in an abusive relationship.

There's no good reason the existence of a drug should prevent you from enjoying an announcement like this. There's definitely no good reason to assume that in this 16 billion year old universe which you've been part of for a negligible amount of time, which you've physically experienced only a negligible amount of, that you've already found the weirdest or most interesting thing ever.

Some useful background for the story: Feynman, Schwinger and Tomonaga shared the 1965 Nobel Prize for Physics for their work in QED.

That being said taking shots at Feynman is a public act of rebellion these days, like running up and touching the scary neighbor's house as a kid.

What about the POWerwheel lacing pattern? Remove some of those retarding spokes for extreme power gains! It may have dominated the other solutions so hard your computer tossed it out as an outlier and was too ashamed to report the error.

Riders of the POWerwheel lacing pattern go so fast it's usually impossible to discern the lacing pattern from the wreckage they leave behind. To compound the problem most POWerwheel accidents are covered up as "space" attacking us with "meteors".

http://sheldonbrown.com/power-wheel.html

In the author's language, Clojure, it's trivial to print the intermediate value at every stage of a threading macro so you can watch your data as it transforms and pinpoint the problem, ex:

    (defn debug-it 
      [x] 
      (println x)
      x)

    (-> input-value
        debug-it 
        function1
        debug-it
        function2
        debug-it
        function3
        debug-it)

Debug-it could also take a custom message at each line if you wanted the output tagged with names/numbers.

He's apparently talking about Clojure's thread macro specifically. If you're not familiar it can be a way to organize code in a straightforward, human-readable, easily debuggable syntax. Ex:

    (~> (sha1 in)
        (bytes->hex-string)
        (bytes-append #".")
        (displayln))

In pseudo-Python this would be:

    displayln(bytes-append(bytes->hex-string(sha1(in)), #"."))

http://www.greghendershott.com/2013/05/the-threading-macro.h...

Diffusers do a similar (but different) thing while looking slightly cooler than dimples :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffuser_%28automotive%29

To expand on this:

If you're familiar with Python Leiningen takes the place of both pip and virtualenv. Every project has a project.clj file where you declare your project dependencies and running "lein deps" from your project root handles it from there. This includes libraries and the version of Clojure you're targeting. When you add/delete/change a dependency in project.clj you simply run "lein deps" again. You never have to run "pip freeze" or make a requirements.txt file because project.clj serves that purpose as well.

As an example, Leiningen's own project.clj: https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen/blob/master/project...