Month: July 2007

Alien Religions

Aliens on dark worlds might develop a very keen sense of temperature and use this for both communication and exploring their environment. While humans can sense gross changes in temperature, some animals on Earth posses thermal sensors far finer than ours. For example, the mosquito can register differences of as little as one 5-hundredths of a degree centigrade at a distance of 1 centimeter. Some fish such as the sole respond to temperature changes in the water of as little as 0.03 degrees Centigrade. The bedbug can crawl along a wall of a bedroom, sense a tiny area of exposed skin, and jump to it.
Humans sense relative temperatures. We know that one glass of tea is hotter than another. But we can’t tell precisely how hot it is. Other creatures on Earth sense absolute temperature. For example, some fish can be trained to recognize a particular temperature within 1 degree of accuracy irrespective of whether the fish came out of a previously warmer or colder environment. Some birds have the ability to maintain their nests at a precise temperature and make small alterations to the nest if it becomes a degree too hot or cold.

lots of wonderfully wacky ideas

Terrorist logos

Ironic Sans has a roundup of logos for terrorist groups, clustered into graphic categories: Stars, One Gun, 2 Guns Crossed, Other Weapons Crossed, Crossbones, Animals with Multiple Heads, and Other.Does the logo successfully convey the organization’s message? Is it confusingly similar to another group’s logo? Does it exhibit excessive drop shadows, gradients, or use of whatever font is the Arabic equivalent of Papyrus?

Underwear created literacy

Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn’t surprising, the source of the new cheap paper is. These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books.

Happy E.T. Jaynes Day

Most fascinating of all is Jaynes’ interpretation of probability theory. He realized that probability theory is a generalization of Aristotlean logic and by introducing degrees of belief this logic can be made much more flexible, as well as capable of dealing with uncertainty. This view is explained at length in his last work, Probability Theory – the Logic of Science. Although some parts of the book are fairly math-heavy, you can still get a lot out of the first few chapters with basic arithmetic.

Probability Theory – the Logic of Science sounds like a worthy read (after the black swan, which i just bought)

Delaminate Telcos

Carriers are gigantic corporate welfare bums. They receive an enormous state subsidy in the form of a right of way that gets them into every household in America. Imagine if the location of every tunnel, pole, and line had to be contracted for and paid for separately — the carriers would go bust.

your cell phone bill is funding terrorism. why do you hate america? go cold turkey on the phone.