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Political relationships 5 Aug 2013 | 07:19 am
In most political theories and ideologies, there is a preposterous oversimplification about what kinds of political relationships are desirable, common, or even possible. Given the irreduceable comple...
A very underrated invention 21 Jul 2013 | 01:16 am
Perhaps the most underrated invention in history is the humble hourglass. Invented in Europe during the late 13th or early 14th century, the sand glass complemented a nearly simultaneous invention, t...
Dead reckoning, maps, and errors 29 Oct 2012 | 10:39 am
In my last post I introduced dead reckoning as used during the exploration explosion. In this post I will describe the errors these explorers (Dias, Columbus, da Gama, etc.) typically encountered in d...
Dead reckoning and the exploration explosion 18 Oct 2012 | 03:08 pm
Navigation is the art or science of combining information and reducing error to keep oneself on, or return oneself to, a route that will get you where you want to go. Note what I did not say here. Nav...
Authority and ad hominem 15 Aug 2012 | 03:35 pm
Argument from authority ("I'm the expert") goes hand-in-hand with the ad hominem ("you're not"). Each may be rebutted by the other, and the average quality as evidence of arguments from authority are ...
Proxy measures, sunk costs, and Chesterton's fence 8 Aug 2012 | 02:58 pm
G.K. Chesterton ponders a fence: In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. Ther...
Three philosophical essays 26 Jul 2012 | 02:33 pm
From Algorithmic Information Theory: Charles Bennett has discovered an objective measurement for sophistication. An example of sophistication is the structure of an airplane. We couldn't just throw p...
Pascal's scams (ii) 23 Jul 2012 | 05:26 pm
Besides the robot apocalypse, there are many other, and often more important, examples of Pascal scams. The following may be or may have been such poorly evidenced but widely feared or hoped-for extr...
Pascal's scams 14 Jul 2012 | 03:16 pm
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The na...
The exploration explosion 9 Jul 2012 | 05:36 pm
Navigating new ocean or new shoreline prior to the 1480s was a fearful affair. Chinese, Arabs, and Europeans alike had kept to known routes so closely that they had failed to discover even such big ta...
