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We want to be precise in our communications -- but that must be balanced with the need for efficiency. The paper above uses information theory to argue that ambiguity is necessary in any efficient communication system when content is informative about meaning. Also @amirask refers to another interesting paper, Compression without a common prior by Brendan Juba et al. (Proceedings of ICS 2011, 79-86), in which speaker and listener have different prior beliefs about what a speaker may say. Again, information theory shows why ambiguity is necessary for the purpose of efficient communication (compression): https://docs.google.com/viewer... - Adriano

That's great, thanks :-) - Maitani

awesome - SteVe C

Image retouched and color-corrected (click on it to enlarge). One of my favorite rooms in the world :-) - Adriano

Kitchen Volume Conversions. - John (bird whisperer) from Bookmarklet

Yep, John, very similar. I like how they look so professional but you really don't need to measure anything that small when you're cooking. - m9m, Crone of FriendFeed

"Floods of raw sensory data trigger perceptions that fall into categories designated by “symbols that stand for abstract regularities in the world,” Douglas Hofstadter asserts. Human brains create vast repertoires of these symbols, conferring the “power to represent phenomena of unlimited complexity and thus to twist back and to engulf themselves via a strange loop.” Consciousness itself occurs when a system with such ability creates a higher-level symbol, a symbol for the ability to create symbols. That symbol is the self. The I. Consciousness. “You and I are mirages that perceive themselves.”" - Adriano

"Gödel’s proof emerged from deep insights into the self-referential nature of mathematical statements. He showed how a system referring to itself creates paradoxes that cannot be logically resolved — and so certain questions cannot in principle be answered. Consciousness, in a way, is in the same logical boat. At its core, consciousness is self-referential awareness, the self’s sense of its own existence. It is consciousness itself that is trying to explain consciousness." - Adriano

"The salad chefs I know fall into two camps: Some serve pre-washed bagged leafy greens straight from the bag. The others insist on washing them first, even though the bag label promises that the contents are "triple-washed." Over the years, I've ignored those labels too. I typically dumped bagged greens in the salad spinner, added plenty of water and spun strenuously. After writing too many stories about food recalls, I vowed that family and friends were not going to swallow E. coli along with their spring mix and lemon vinaigrette. Now it seems the straight-from-the-bag camp may have it right after all. By re-washing our greens, we may be making our salads dirtier, according to a bevy of food safety experts. Even our best-kept kitchens can teem with all sorts of harmful pathogens, on cutting boards and in salad spinners, on knives that just sliced raw chicken, on damp, well-used cloth towels. "In brief, consumers don't wash up very well and may contaminate produce due to dirty hands... more... - John (bird whisperer) from Bookmarklet

A friend used to get stomach aches from bagged greens, until someone suggested she wash them first. That fixed it. - Betsy

"If we think that humans have evolved as social learners, we might be surprised to find out that being social learners has made us less intelligent than we might like to think we are. And here’s the reason why. (...) I can choose among the best of those ideas, without having to go through the process of innovation myself. So, for example, if I’m trying to make a better spear, I really have no idea how to make that better spear. But if I notice that somebody else in my society has made a very good spear, I can simply copy him without having to understand why. (...) We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves. (...) As our societies get larger and larger, there’s no need, in fact, there’s even less of a need for any one of us to be an innovator, whereas there is a great advantage for most of us to be copiers, or followers.... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thanks for pointing this book, Ruchira! I still have in mind Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers" - an interesting study of what determines the "success" and redefines the word "genius" (from a more sociological context). http://www.amazon.com/Outlier... - Amira

"Several biologically inspired paths are being explored by computer scientists in universities and corporate laboratories worldwide." - bcultral from Bookmarklet

lots of 5 star reviews on amazon - Halil

Hi ramazan :-) - Maitani

EVERYthing with the word "neuro" attached is the wrong kind of knowledge to understand ANYthing, not just art! .. ok, it's somewhat useful for tissues, physical stuff, but the physical is the limit - Gregory Lent

“Human language, coupled with human maternal care, enables the consciousness to bifurcate very early and extensively. Without the self-reflective properties inherent in a reflexive agent- recipient language, and without the objectification of the human infant — a very different kind of humanity would arise. Human consciousness, as constructed by human language, becomes the vehicle through which the self-reflective human mind envisions time. Language enables the viewer to reflect upon the actions of the doer (and the actions of one’s internal body), while projecting forward and backward — other possible bodily actions — into imagined space/time. Thus the projected and imagined space/time increasingly becomes the conscious world and reality of the viewer who imagines or remembers actions mapped onto that projected plan. (...) Having once marked this imagined time into units, the conscious viewer begins to order the anticipated actions of the body into a linear progression of events. A personal narrative then arises through the vehicle of language. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"While Kanzi and family are bonobos, the kind of language they have acquired — even if they have not manifested all major components yet (....) Therefore, although their biology remains that of apes, their consciousness has begun to change as a function of the language, the marks it leaves on their minds and the epigenetic marks it leaves on the next generation. (...) They explore art,... more... - Amira

"Ideas just aren’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, they could ignite fires of debate, stimulate other thoughts, incite revolutions and fundamentally change the ways we look at and think about the world. (...)Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style. (…) There is the retreat in universities from the real world, and an encouragement of and reward for the narrowest specialization rather than for daring — for tending potted plants rather than planting forests. (...)We are certainly the most informed generation in history, at least quantitatively. There are trillions upon trillions of bytes out there in the ether — so much to gather and to think about. And that’s just the point. In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

See also: 'The Secret of Innovation: The Best Ideas Are Small': "Malcolm Gladwell praised what he saw as the real genius of Apple’s late CEO [Steve Jobs]. He was a tweaker. He took things that existed, such as the computer mouse and the smartphone and the tablet, and he made them more perfect. (...) The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imagines the world. The tweaker... more... - Amira

I tried in vain to find an angle that didn't include this lamp post, but hey, I guess it makes for an interesting silhouette! :-/ Anyway, hope you all have a wonderful evening, I'm off to get ready to watch The Walking Dead s2 ep2! Night all. - Halil from Bookmarklet

"An astrolabe (Greek: ἁστρολάβον astrolabon, "star-taker")[1] is an elaborate inclinometer, historically used by astronomers, navigators, and astrologers. Its many uses include locating and predicting the positions of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars, determining local time given local latitude and vice-versa, surveying, triangulation, and to cast horoscopes. It was used in classical antiquity, through the Islamic Golden Age, the European Middle Ages and Renaissance for all these purposes. In the Islamic world, it was also used to calculate the Qibla and to find the times for Salah, prayers." - Eivind from Bookmarklet

Was he an astronomer or did he use it for religious purposes? - Eivind

Scientists have discovered how cancerous cells can "elbow" their way out of tumours, offering clues for new drugs to prevent cancers spreading. They say they have identified a protein called JAK which helps cancerous cells generate the force needed to move. Writing in Cancer Cell, they say the cells contract like muscle to force their way out and around the body. Cancer Research UK said the study provided fresh understanding of ways to stop cancer spreading. When cancers spread, a process known as metastasis, they become more difficult to treat, as secondary tumours tend to be more aggressive. It is thought that 90% of cancer-related deaths occur after metastasis. - Halil from Bookmarklet

extra info: Janus kinase (JAK, or "Just another kinase") is a family of intracellular, non-receptor tyrosine kinases that transduce cytokine-mediated signals via the JAK-STAT pathway. They were initially named "just another kinase" 1 & 2 (since they were just two of a large number of discoveries in a PCR-based screen of kinases[1]), but were ultimately published as "Janus kinase". The... more... - Halil

“We suggest in this essay that artists either consciously or unconsciously deploy certain rules or principles (we call them laws) to titillate the visual areas of the brain. Some of these laws, we believe, are original to this article—at least in the context of art. Others (such as grouping) have been known for a long time and can be found in any art manual, but the question of why a given principle should be effective is rarely raised: the principle is usually just presented as a rule-of-thumb. In this essay we try to present all (or many) of these laws together and provide a coherent biological framework, for only when they are all considered simultaneously and viewed in a biological context do they begin to make sense. There are in fact three cornerstones to our argument. First, what might loosely be called the ‘internal logic’ of the phenomenon (what we call ‘laws’ in this essay). Second, the evolutionary rationale: the question of why the laws evolved and have that particular... more... - Amira

See also: Processing Fluency and Aesthetic Pleasure: Is Beauty in the Perceiver’s Processing Experience? (pdf) https://bora.uib.no/bitstre... - Amira

"One might think, for example, that evolutionary processes could increase the number of neurons in our brain or boost the rate at which those neurons exchange information and that such changes would make us smarter. But several recent trends of investigation, if taken together and followed to their logical conclusion, seem to suggest that such tweaks would soon run into physical limits. Ultimately those limits trace back to the very nature of neurons and the statistically noisy chemical exchanges by which they communicate. (...) We know that as brains get larger, they save space and energy by limiting the number of direct connections between regions. The large human brain has relatively few of these long-distance connections. But Bullmore and van den Heuvel showed that these rare, nonstop connections have a disproportionate influence on smarts: brains that scrimp on resources by cutting just a few of them do noticeably worse. “You pay a price for intelligence,” Bullmore concludes,... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Van den Heuvel found that shorter paths between brain areas correlated with higher IQ." The brain and internets both try to minimize latency between nodes by locating those with specialized tasks close to each other spatially (e.g. hemispheres / server centers) -- it's all about pressing the buzzer more quickly :-) Any numerical estimates on how much the latency could be reduced? Would a different physical configuration increase intelligence (without trade-offs)? - Adriano

Wow. I thought that Whiskey River was long gone. I remember when he quit his site. Of course, this could be a different site entirely but the layout's remarkably similar. - Akiva

“Violence itself is a form of communication, it’s a way of sending a message and it does that through symbolic means through damaging the body. But if people can express themselves and communicate verbally they don’t need violence and they are much less likely to use their fists or weapons as their means of communication. They are much more likely to use words. I’m saying this on the basis of clinical experience, working with violent people. (…) When people experience their moral universe as going between the polar opposites of shame versus honour, or we could also say shame versus pride, they are more likely to engage in serious violence. The more people have a capacity for feelings of guilt and feelings of remorse after hurting other people, the less likely they are to kill others. I think in the history of Europe what one can see is a gradual increase in moral development from the shame/honour code to the guilt/innocence code. (...) Hitler came to power on the campaign promise to... more... - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you for your comment, Amira! You're right - I stuck on this single statement! Because it affects me! The problem with "Treat others as you want to be treaten by them!" is the violence and brutality, that others may use against your children! - Isn't it "humanity" that is claimed as unique behaviour of man? - Every animal knows, that it has to behave in a social manner, if it wants... more... - Kreuzberg-Jakob

Love them! - Jenny R from Android

thanks, Elyla :-) - Maitani

Hülya Koçyiğit'in gençliğine benzettim bir an :) - Şeker Portakalı

gaydamı o ses? hımm..ormanda dans ediyomuş gibi hissettirdi:) hıımm...çok hoş.) - neferteti

"Mark Zuckerberg is the world’s youngest billionaire. He got there by founding facebook.com, one of the biggest beasts in the Internet jungle. In the early days, so the story goes, he boasted to a friend on instant messenger that he had the personal details of over 4,000 students in Harvard, and if he ever wanted to know anything he should get in touch. Understandably, his incredulous friend wanted to know how Zuckerberg had access to this information. His reply? ‘People just submitted it. I don’t know why. They trust me, dumbf***s.’ The online environment is no longer merely an aid to living well offline; for many, it has become a forum where much of life is now conducted. But one issue that raises its head again and again is this question of trust on the Internet. Examining whether and how we can design the Internet for online trust is the focus of my research in the Faculty of Philosophy, supervised by Dr Alex Oliver. The project is sponsored by Microsoft Research, whose... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet