RSSLinks sept 07
Sep 30
- Bombed out in space with a spaced out bomb: clips from the film ‘Dark Star’, where some deep-space astronaunts revive their captain from suspended animation to help them reason with a self-aware nuclear bomb that is threatening to explode. His advice: “Teach….it….phenomenology”. Awesome (thanks Jack, I’d completely forgotten the title of the film).
- This is how to break into a maximum security international conference
- Crookedtimber.org Rationality and Utility: ‘any kind of behavior…can be modeled as the maximization of some function. But it might not be helpful to think of that function as utility, or as the act of maximizing it as the manifestation of rationality.’
- ‘Anyone around Blair knew without being told that the story had to be confected; had to be true. Otherwise there could be no British participation in the war’
- Shalizi on econophysics
- ‘if science as a whole is this and this alone, then it is man himself who ends up being reduced’ The Pope on faith, reason and the University
- Mindhacks.com: ‘Musicogenic epilepsy is a neurological disorder where epileptic seizures are uncontrollably triggered by music. Gloria Estefan’s Dr Beat is a catchy 80s pop song where she calls for medical assistance because music is irresistibly moving her body, moving her soul and affecting her brain. Coincidence? I think not.’
- Complex systems science modelling: ‘The Essence of Group Conflict: Separation with poorly defined boundaries leads to ethnic violence’
- Very cool self-organising robot locomotion (Lab page)
- MP3 of Tom Waits’ “Bottom of the World”
- censusalert.org.uk ‘The next UK Census will be in 2011. Help us stop it being run by an arms company with close links to the United States government.’
Oct 02, 2007 @ 08:21:45
“Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself !