November 2011
2 posts
Women in Startups Quote from Brazen Careerist
http://blog.penelopetrunk.com/2011/10/26/what-startup-lifes-really-like/
The dirty secret about startup founders is they can’t keep marriages together. Part of the reason for this is they are crazy to begin with. And part of the reason is that you have to be married to your company to do a startup. So divorce rates are high, especially among women, because they are much less likely to have a...
Candid camera/just for laughs idea
A construction worker is putting up a plaque on the wall that says “do not post signs on this wall”, but is interrupted and asks a bystander to hold up the sign in place against the wall while he goes off to do something. A cop comes by, and tells the bystander that they can’t put that here because of the sign. When the bystander puts it down, someone else comes along and puts a...
May 2011
7 posts
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 21
Pinker compares the mating habits of various species:
Apes have a wide variety of sexual arrangements. The means, by the way, that there is no such thing as an “ape legacy” that humans are doomed to live by. Gorillas live on the fringes of forests in small groups of one male and several females, and the males fight each other for control over females, the males evolving to be twice...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 20
Pinker (but actually Trivers) on the difference attitudes towards sex between males and females:
Trivers has worked out how all the prominent differences between males and females stem from the difference in the minimum size of their investment in offspring. Investment, remember, is anything a parent does that increases the chance of survival in an offspring while decreasing the parent’s...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 19
Pinker on why there are 2 sexes:
Why do we make one big egg and lots of little sperm, instead of two equal blobs that coalesce like mercury? It is because the cell that is to become the baby cannot be just a bag of genes; it needs the metabolic machinery of the rest of a cell. Some of that machinery, the mitochondria, has its own genes, the famous mitochondrial DNA which is so useful in dating...
The Anti-Slut Dream
Tomorrow is Monday and I’ll have to go to school—Mcgill University; at least three classes; math in the morning, and two more I can’t recall; I need to become more organized, I haven’t printed out my schedule yet—but I am filled with despair and loneliness. I said tomorrow, but it’s today. It’s 3 AM, or some other ungodly hour of the night. I’m not keeping...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 18
Pinker explains the evolutionary origin of sex:
Why is there sex to begin with? […] Why don’t women give virgin birth to daughters who are clones of themselves instead[…]? Why do people and other organisms swap out half their genes for the genes of another member of the species[…]? It’s not to evolve faster, because organisms are selected for fitness in the present....
Childhood memories
When I was a kid, I snuck into my parents’ bedroom and put in the tape of Terminator 2. 10 seconds into the movie, there’s a pile of skulls and some sort of caterpillar tracks rolling over them and crushing them. Too terrified, I immediately stopped the movie and ejected it, and never watched any of their videos again.
Sexism in Amazon's video game recommendations for...
I have trouble understanding people who call out market research as sexism. The author is complaining about the selection of video games that Amazon has listed as recommendations for mother’s day gifts. She points out that the games are mostly exercise or simulations (in the sense of simulating cooking, simulating raising a family, etc.), and that they are primarily games for the Nintendo DS...
/r/SketchDaily: April 30th - Sadness
Felt like I took an “easy” way out, though.
April 2011
15 posts
RedditGifts: /r/craftexchange #1
Trivia:
In panel 5, there’s a quarter to show the scale of the box.
The caption next to the scissors say “wonkiest scissors ever” and “You can cut him loose from the box - just be careful!”, and the shape of the scissors is such that they could never be effective at cutting anything.
Either the bear or the reindeer (probably the reindeer, but I can’t...
Why do the browser wars exist? Why do companies...
Asked on Reddit.
I don’t consider myself much of a business analyst, but I’ve been following a lot of the news stories around browsers, and I felt I had some insight to share:
Firefox makes receives money from Google for making Google the default search engine, and the more popular Firefox is, the more leveraging power they get to negotiate more money. Also, a lot of contributors to...
You find yourself transported back in time to...
This question as originally posted on Reddit.
Hmm, 1940… That means World War II is about to start. And I think people were still pretty racist back then, right? That sucks, ‘cause I’m Asian.
Okay, World War 2 and England… Think, Nebu, think… OMG, Alan Turing must be around here! I’d do everything in my power to find him. I don’t know if I’d tell...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 17
Having established the evolutionary origins of irrationality, Pinker now explains love:
Why does romantic love leave us bewitched, bothered, and bewildered? Could it be another paradoxical tactic […]? Quite possibly. Offering to spend your life and raise children with someone is the most important promise you’ll ever make, and a promise is most credible when the promiser can’t...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 16
On how the evolutionary adaptiveness of being irrational
It is 1962, and you are the president of the United States. You have just learned that the Soviet Union has dropped an atomic bomb on New York. You know they will not attack again. In front of you is the phone to the Pentagon, the proverbial button, with which you can retaliate by bombing Moscow.
You are about to press the button. The...
The fascination of the private lives of Feynman...
Some original content, yay: Everybody has heard of Albert Einstein. Almost everybody has heard of Steven Hawking. A good number of people have heard of Richard Feynman. But if you took a random person off of the street, what could they tell you about these people?
Many might be able to tell you the names of the discoveries made by these people, or other references to them...
Feynman lectures quote?
By now, you will have been bombarded with Steven Pinker quotes and grown sick and tired of them. So is it good news or bad news that I’ve started reading Richard Feynman’s lecture notes?
I’ve no idea if I will have a continued interest in quoting various passages of his lecture notes (I see this, and my series on Pinker as been an intellectual-elitist variant on retweeting...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 15
On the good of the group:
Most discussions of the biology of altruism are really not about the biology of altruism. It’s easy to see why nature documentaries, with their laudable conservationist ethic, disseminate the agitprop that animals act in the interest of the group. One subtext is, Don’t hate the wolf that just ate Bambi; he’s acting for the greater good. The other is,...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 14
On altruism and love:
Earlier I said that natural selection selects selfish replicators. If organisms were replicators, all organisms should be selfish. But organisms do not replicate. Your parents did not replicate when they had you, because you are not identical to either of them. The blueprint that made you—your set of genes—is not the same as the blueprint that made them. Their genes were...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 13
On the selfish gene:
Having seen nature documentaries, you may believe that wolves weed out the old and weak deer to keep the herd healthy, that lemmings commit suicide to prevent the population form starving, or that stags ram into each other for the right to breed so that the fittest individuals may perpetuate the species. The underlying assumption—that animals act for the good of the...
tumblrbot asked: WHAT IS YOUR EARLIEST HUMAN MEMORY?
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 12
On the political weaponization of food-taboos:
Food taboos are obviously an ethnic marker, but by itself that observation explains nothing. Why do people wear ethnic badges to begin with, let alone a costly one like banning a source of nutrients? The social sciences assume without question that people submerge their interests to the group, but on evolutionary grounds that is unlikely (as we...
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 11
On the evolutionary purpose of disgust:
What is disgust for? Rozin points out that the human species faces “the omnivore’s dilemma.” Unlike, say, koalas, who mainly eat eucalyptus leaves and are vulnerable when those become scarce, omnivores choose from a vast menu of potential foods. The downside is that many are poison. Many fish, amphibians, and invertebrates contain potent...
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 10
On disgust-acquisition:
During World War II, American pilots in the Pacific went hungry rather than eat the toads and bugs that they had been taught were perfectly safe.
[… D]igust is manifestly irrational. People who are sickened by the thought of eating a disgusting object will say it is unsanitary or harmful. But they find a sterilized cockroach every bit as revolting as one fresh from...
March 2011
2 posts
Intro to multi-key decryption
Cryptography: I’m going to show how it’s possible for two people to have different private keys, and yet both be able to decrypt the same documents. Prerequisite: you should know that this is what a polynomial equation looks like: y = 4x^0 + 3x^1 + 7x^2 -3x^3, and you should be able to vaguely visualize such equations as graphs (in your mind or on paper). You should probably also be...
re: No More Excuses: “It’s The Middle Ages, Yo!”
On how many authors choose what elements of medieval history to apply to their work of fiction, Quinnae Moongazer writes:
many of us were immediately met with cries of “but it’s supposed to be like the Middle Ages!” Let me explain why this is patently ridiculous using my usual flawless logic.
Or, perhaps more appropriately, using their logic.
I have heard this used about World of Warcraft’s...
February 2011
2 posts
The Adventure Game Dream
I just had another one reoccurring dream, one that I hadn’t had in a long time. I really like this dream ‘cause it’s sort of like one of those point and click adventure games. I’m a “normal” news reporter (basically a gender-reversed Lois Lane), and one of the NPCs I meet, among others, are super woman, a (sympathetic) male werewolf, a (sympathetic) female...
In defense of Circular Reasoning part 2
I originally intended this to be a comment reply to Gary, but I started to feel the need to include diagrams and such, and so now it’s its own post. Gary suffers from this tragic medical condition (since birth) in which takes every concept he encounters, and tries to apply graph theory to it. He has shared with me, in confidence, his intention to create a separate internet in which he can...
December 2010
2 posts
In defense of Circular Reasoning
In the first draft of this post, I spent an inordinate amount of time explaining the concepts of “axioms”, “propositions”, “logical equivalence”, and so on, only to come to the realization that the people who are actually going to care enough to read this post probably already know what all those terms mean anyway. So let’s skip to the real meat of the...
Encoding directed graphs in undirected graphs
My friend Gary challenged me to try to encode a directed graph as an undirected graph. Clearly jealous of my superior intellect, every time I came up with a solution (e.g. “A single node, where the label of the node is the Base64 encoding of the directed graph.”), he’d make up some excuse why my answer was not acceptable (“no labels”, “there’s a million...
November 2010
1 post
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 9
On the definition of emotion:
Supposedly Mr. Spock, the Vulcan mastermind, didn’t have emotions […]. But Spock’s emotionlessness really just amounted to his being in control, not losing his head, coolly voicing unpleasant truths, and so on. He must have been driven by some motives or goals. Something must have kept Spock from spending his days calculating pi to a quadrillion...
October 2010
4 posts
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 8
Pinker on the rational-emotional dichotomy:
The Romantic movement in philosophy, literature and art began about two hundred years ago, and since then the emotions and the intellect have been assigned to different realms. […]
The irrational emotions and the repressing intellect keep reappearing in scientific guises: the id and the superego, the biological drives and cultural norms, the...
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 7
Pinker on the misunderstanding of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
In interviews on language I have been asked, Who but the Jews would have a word, naches, for luminous pride in a child’s accomplishments? And does it not say something profound about the Teutonic psyche that the German lnaguage has the word Schadenfreude, pleasure in another’s misfortunes?
[…] Whether a language...
Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” Quotes 6
Amok is a Malay word for the homocidal sprees occasionally undertaken by lonely Indochinese men who have suffered a loss of love, a loss of money, or a loss of face. The syndrome has been described in a culture even more remote from the West: the stone-age foragers of Papua New Guina.
The Amok man is patently out of his mind, an automaton oblivious to his surroundings and unreachable by appeals...
I just had the most Freudian dream ever
My dad is driving the family to my paternal grandfather’s funeral-dinner. My maternal-grandmother. my brother. and myself are the passengers. My mom is supposedly a passenger too, but she seems to never speak or do anything the whole dream. My grandmother is asking me about the something about measuring information in writing, so I tell her there are many ways of measuring information, such...
September 2010
2 posts
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 5
On many people taking the meme-evolution analogy too far:
The other extension of adaptation is the seemingly innocuous cliché that “cultural evolution has taken over from biological evolution.” […]
Richard Dawkins has drawn the clearest analogy between the selection of genes and the selection of bits of culture, which he dubbed memes. Memes such as tunes, ideas, and stories...
Therapy
This is fictional, autobiographical, and self-referential, and thus becomes non-fiction, since it refers to a real body of work (itself). More than anything else, it’s cathartic, and thus unfortunately probably very emo.
I meet our therapist for the first time, and I immediately ask about her credentials: How many patients has she treated before, whether or not number of patients is a good...
August 2010
6 posts
Questions 3
In terms of animal rights, do you believe that all species should be equally protected by law?
Any such law would be completely unenforceable, and unenforceable laws are “bad” IMHO. Should we really punish people for killing locus and other pests that could cause famine? Or for accidentally running over some ants or splattering other insects on the windshield?
Another factor is that...
Questions 2
Do you believe that scientific investigation is the only effective method to gain meaningful knowledge about the universe?
This is a wrongly-phrased question, as it falsely implies that the only alternative to “scientific investigation” must be faith or magic or religion or something along those lines. I have a very specific idea of what “scientific investigation” means:...
Questions
Imagine that scientists create a new drug. When swallowed as a pill, it will completely and permanently eliminate feelings of guilt for prior events. Testing reveals that there are no harmful medical side effects. How should this pill be distributed?
After some though, I figured that having the drug be publicly available really doesn’t add much harm, and can do a lot of guilt. We already...
Albums I like
Here’s a short list of my current favorite albums, in case you’re looking for new music suggestion.
Great piano pieces in “Another Mind” and “Spiral” by “Hiromi” (She’s got plenty of Youtube videos if you want to check her out), some relaxing, some high energy.
Downtempo alternative with a touch of progressive rock in “As far as the eye...
A simple explanation of the P vs NP problem
You may have seen a lot of buzz about “P vs NP” floating around on the Internet, and possibly the media. If you have no idea what that’s all about, and you want to find out, this blog post is for you. As one redditor put it: “Polynomial time? fast algorithm? Huh? Let’s start off simply: What is a P, what is an NP, and why are they fighting?”
P and NP are...
3 tags
"How The Mind Works" Interlude
It’s no secret to those who know me that my memory is (abnormally?) terrible. It’s one of the more remarkable aspects of my personality. But just now, I had a dream which seems to confirm that my subconscious has an much better memory than my conscious mind (I might even dare say it is better than the average conscious memory), but that I don’t have easy access to this memory.
A...
July 2010
5 posts
4 tags
Aspie Advice
Someone wrote to me, asking for advice. I didn’t really ask permission before posting this, so I’m stripping out the identifying information:
Hi nebu, hope i’m not intruding in a way that isn’t pleasant, but I just saw some of your posts on what it’s like to have aspergers and was curious about a few things. A good friend of mine is also diagnosed with aspergers...
We suck at RPGs part 1
This is intended to be a series of short stories/anecdotes of me and my friends trying to play RPGs, both pen&paper and computer/videogames. I’ve got a ton of these stories, but many of them require you to see my body language, and how lividly pissed I am at my friends for fucking everything up, to truly enjoy. Those that can be expressed purely as text, I will attempt to transcribe...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 4
On the inevitability of the evolution of intelligence:
[E]minent biologist Ernst Mayr […] had noted that only one of the fifty million species on earth had developed civilizations, so the probability that life on a given planet would include an intelligent species might very well be small. Drake replied:
The first species to develop intelligent civilizations will discover that it is the...
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 3
This time, I can offer some substance. Pinker argues that the “Computational Theory of Mind” (CToM) is the “correct” theory, and that opposing theories are incorrect. Coincidentally, the two alternative theories that he contrasts against are two theories that I am already familiar with.
The first (actually not a full-blown theory, as much as a counter argument) is...
I'm the boss, so I choose what time I leave work
There’s no contradiction in “I’m the boss, so I choose what time I leave work” and “I have to do overtime nonstop for the next month or so”. If you’re an employee, the reason you can’t leave work is ‘cause your boss said so. If you’re the boss, the reason you can’t leave work is that your whole business is gonna fall apart and...
June 2010
2 posts
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes 2
Pinker magnificently reconciles determinism with morality.
As science advances and explanations of behavior become less fanciful, the Specter of Creeping Exculpation, as Dennet calls it, will loom larger. Without a clearer moral philosophy, any cause of behavior could be taken to undermine free will and hence moral responsibility. Science is guaranteed to appear to eat away at the will,...
5 tags
Steven Pinker's "How the Mind Works" Quotes
After a discussion (almost a year ago?) on Reddit, one of the commentators recommended that I read Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works”. I ordered the book, and it arrived shortly afterwards, but I only started going through it recently. It’s a pretty hefty book, at just under 570 pages excluding the index and bibliography and all that stuff, but the rate at which I’m...