mwfogleman + wikipedia   146

Ulam spiral - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Ulam spiral, or prime spiral (in other languages also called the Ulam Cloth) is a simple method of visualizing the prime numbers that reveals the apparent tendency of certain quadratic polynomials to generate unusually large numbers of primes. It was discovered by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1963, while he was doodling during the presentation of a “long and very boring paper”[1] at a scientific meeting. Shortly afterwards, in an early application of computer graphics, Ulam with collaborators Myron Stein and Mark Wells used MANIAC II at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory to produce pictures of the spiral for numbers up to 65,000.[2][1][3] In March of the following year, Martin Gardner wrote about the Ulam spiral in his Mathematical Games column;[1] the Ulam spiral featured on the front cover of the issue of Scientific American in which the column appeared.
geometry  math  mathematics  visualization  wikipedia 
6 days ago by mwfogleman
Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
bias  cognitive  incompetence  psychology  wikipedia 
6 days ago by mwfogleman
Zipf's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Zipf's law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.
language  wikipedia 
9 days ago by mwfogleman
Town meeting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I am more and more convinced that, with reference to any public question, it is more important to know what the country thinks of it than what the city thinks. The city does not think much. On any moral question, I would rather have the opinion of Boxboro than of Boston and New York put together. When the former speaks, I feel as if somebody had spoken, as if humanity was yet, and a reasonable being had asserted its rights — as if some unprejudiced men among the country's hills had at length turned their attention to the subject, and by a few sensible words redeemed the reputation of the race. When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town-meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.
—Henry David Thoreau
wikipedia  politics  america  massachusetts  newengland 
13 days ago by mwfogleman
Erdős number - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Erdős number (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈɛrdøːʃ]) describes the "collaborative distance" between a person and mathematician Paul Erdős, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers.
The same principle has been proposed for other eminent people in other fields.
academic  humor  math  wikipedia 
13 days ago by mwfogleman
Heuristic - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Heuristic ( /hjʉˈrɪstɨk/; or heuristics; Greek: "Εὑρίσκω", "find" or "discover") refers to experience-based techniques for problem solving, learning, and discovery. Where an exhaustive search is impractical, heuristic methods are used to speed up the process of finding a satisfactory solution. Examples of this method include using a rule of thumb, an educated guess, an intuitive judgment, or common sense.
In more precise terms, heuristics are strategies using readily accessible, though loosely applicable, information to control problem solving in human beings and machines.
heuristics  learning  psychology  philosophy  wikipedia 
14 days ago by mwfogleman
Prefigurative politics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The term prefigurative politics is widespread within various activist movements, and it describes modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group. The desire is to "be the change we want to see in the world" as Gandhi wrote.
politics  wikipedia 
29 days ago by mwfogleman
Global Internet population and knowledge | MetaFilter
don't tell me that the promise of universal access to networked information is "largely unrealized". People in the education business -- both those who educate others and those who seek to educate themselves -- have very real access to the networked library of mankind, and they are making very real use of it.

The author may not see it, but we are living through a great renaissance right now. There are certain types of minds -- very creative, very determined, and very thirsty for knowledge -- that we as a race have wasted for years. A thousand Einsteins have lived and died in a thousand remote villages, far from the libraries they needed. They don't have to do that any more.

We finally brought the library to them.
education  internet  wikipedia  metafilter 
5 weeks ago by mwfogleman
Anomie - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In Albert Camus's existentialist novel The Stranger, the bored, alienated protagonist Meursault struggles to construct an individual system of values as he responds to the disappearance of the old. He exists largely in a state of anomie, as seen from the apathy evinced in the opening lines: "Aujourd’hui, maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas" ("Today mother died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know"). When Mersault is prosecuted for shooting an Arab man during a fight, the prosecuting attorneys seem more interested in the inability or unwillingness of Meursault to cry at his mother's funeral than the murder of the Arab, because they find his lack of remorse offensive. The novel ends with Meursault recognizing the universe's indifference toward humankind. In the first half of the novel Meursault is clearly an unreflecting, unapologetic individual. Ultimately, Camus presents the world as essentially meaningless and therefore, the only way to arrive at any meaning or purpose is to make it oneself.
emotion  psychology  wikipedia 
11 weeks ago by mwfogleman
Goodhart's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Goodhart's law, although it can be expressed in many ways, states that once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play that role.
wikipedia 
11 weeks ago by mwfogleman
Kalām cosmological argument - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Kalām cosmological argument is a variation of the cosmological argument that argues for the existence of a First Cause for the universe. Its origins can be traced to medieval Jewish, Christian and Muslim thinkers, but most directly to Islamic theologians of the Kalām tradition.[1] Its historic proponents include John Philoponus,[2] Al-Kindi,[3] Saadia Gaon,[4] Al-Ghazali,[5] and St. Bonaventure.[6] A prominent contemporary Western proponent is William Lane Craig.[7]
god  wikipedia 
february 2012 by mwfogleman
Collingridge dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Or as Collingridge himself so eloquently put it: "When change is easy, the need for it cannot be foreseen; when the need for change is apparent, change has become expensive, difficult and time consuming."

http://www.edge.org/responses/what-is-your-favorite-deep-elegant-or-beautiful-explanation
wikipedia 
january 2012 by mwfogleman
Who’s Donating to Wikipedia? Everybody. Latest Drive Raises $20M from 1M+ Donors | Singularity Hub
"In short, the Wikimedia Foundation is a grounded and realistic organization that relies on seemingly surreal levels of public interest. That alone is an indication of the current state of the internet. The crowd is becoming something like the wind, tides, or sun. A seemingly vast and renewable resource that humanity is just starting to harness well, and may take decades to leverage properly. The fact that this resource is made up of humanity only makes it more intriguing."
wikipedia 
january 2012 by mwfogleman
Chiasmus - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Today, chiasmus is applied fairly broadly to any "criss-cross" structure, although in classical rhetoric it was distinguished from other similar devices, such as the antimetabole. In its classical application, chiasmus would have been used for structures that do not repeat the same words and phrases, but invert a sentence's grammatical structure or ideas. The concept of chiasmus on a higher level, applied to motifs, turns of phrase, or whole passages, is called chiastic structure.
trope  rhetoric  grammar  language  poetry  wikipedia 
january 2012 by mwfogleman
Paul Goodman (writer) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Goodman wrote on a wide variety of subjects; including education, Gestalt Therapy, city life and urban design, children's rights, politics, literary criticism, and many more. In an interview with Studs Terkel, Goodman said "I might seem to have a number of divergent interests — community planning, psychotherapy, education, politics — but they are all one concern: how to make it possible to grow up as a human being into a culture without losing nature. I simply refuse to acknowledge that a sensible and honorable community does not exist."
wikipedia  writing  thought  civilization 
january 2012 by mwfogleman
Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society | Library of Economics and Liberty
Wales cites Austrian School economist Friedrich von Hayek's essay "The Use of Knowledge in Society", which he read as an undergraduate,[16] as "central" to his thinking about "how to manage the Wikipedia project".[11]
economics  essay  information  knowledge  wikipedia 
december 2011 by mwfogleman
Outsider art - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Those works created from solitude and from pure and authentic creative impulses – where the worries of competition, acclaim and social promotion do not interfere – are, because of these very facts, more precious than the productions of professionals. After a certain familiarity with these flourishings of an exalted feverishness, lived so fully and so intensely by their authors, we cannot avoid the feeling that in relation to these works, cultural art in its entirety appears to be the game of a futile society, a fallacious parade." - Jean Dubuffet. Place à l'incivisme (Make way for Incivism). Art and Text no.27 (December 1987 - February 1988). p.36 Dubuffet's writing on art brut was the subject of a noted program at the Art Club of Chicago in the early 1950s.
alternative  art  culture  illustration  wikipedia 
december 2011 by mwfogleman
A. R. Ammons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
According to critic Stephen Burt, in many poems Ammons combines three types of diction:
A “normal” range of language for poetry, including the standard English of educated conversation and the slightly rarer words we expect to see in literature (“vast,” “summon,” “universal”).
A demotic register, including the folk-speech of eastern North Carolina, where he grew up (“dibbles”), and broader American chatter unexpected in serious poems (“blip”).
The Greek- and Latin-derived phraseology of the natural sciences (“millimeter,” “information of actions / summarized”), especially geology, physics, and cybernetics.
Such a mixture is nearly unique, Burt says; these three modes are "almost never found together outside his poems".
poetry  poems  poet  wikipedia  writing 
december 2011 by mwfogleman
Socratic method - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elenchus (Ancient Greek: ἔλεγχος elengkhos "argument of disproof or refutation; cross-examining, testing, scrutiny esp. for purposes of refutation"[3]) is the central technique of the Socratic method. The Latin form elenchus (plural elenchi ) is used in English as the technical philosophical term.[4]
philosophy  reason  wikipedia 
november 2011 by mwfogleman
Interlingua - Wikipedia, le encyclopedia libere
TIL about Interlingua. You've never read this language before, but you can probably understand it if you know English, or any Romance language.
language  wikipedia 
june 2010 by mwfogleman
Theistic evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Theistic evolution and evolutionary creationism are similar concepts that assert that classical religious teachings about God are compatible with much or all of the modern scientific understanding about biological evolution. In short, theistic evolutionists believe that there is a God, that he is (in some way) the creator of the material universe and (by consequence) all life within, and that biological evolution is simply a natural process within that creation. Evolution, according to this view, is simply a tool that God created and employed to help life grow and flourish.
Theistic evolution is not a theory in the scientific sense, but a particular view about how the science of evolution relates to religious belief and interpretation. Theistic evolution supporters can be seen as one of the groups who reject the conflict thesis regarding the relationship between religion and science.
theism  evolution  wikipedia 
april 2009 by mwfogleman
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