Revulsion to the Mean

Robot or Not? is my favorite podcast.  And not just because it averages about 3 minutes in length. Robot or Not? is everything the internet should be: pedantic, opinionated, and, ultimately, inconsequential.  In every episode, one host (Jason Snell) asks the other (John Siracusa) whether a robot-like something is a robot (or not), and Siracusa answers him by reference to either a Platonic robot in his head or the master list of robot criteria (also in his head), mostly the latter.  And depending on unknown factors, Siracusa talks for two to twenty minutes about his categorization of the robot-like something. Those factors are obviously not the difficulty of the situation.  I think Siracusa shows doubt about one and a half times over the first one hundred episodes, but that may be three times too many.  In his mind, Siracusa's categorization are clear and immediate, although it takes several episodes for you to figure out what they are.  I won't spoil ...

Thanu Padmanahhan's book, Sleeping Beauties in Theoretical Physics is a great find.  It's reasonably accessible for a technical tome on theoretical physics, it has an interesting framework that makes the connections between chapters on very different subjects coherent, and it covers a number of interesting topics, including ones that I'd thought I'd have references to in other books but my knowledge of them must have come from papers. The feature that Padmanabhan uses to categorize physics is similar to the one used by Griffiths in his Introduction to Electrodynamics:  a cube has eight vertices, and each of these vertices is a type of physical theory.  Each of the eight vertices has one of three Boolean values: gravitation, relativity, and quantum.  If the effect is accounted for, the value is on, if not, it's off.  The vertex where they are all off is Newtonian Mechanics (without gravity) and the far vertex is a Theory of Everything (or somesuch, he calls it...

Hey, Jackass! , subtitled "Illustrating Chicago Values," is one of my favorite websites. Twice a day, every day, Chicago's murder and gun shot statistics are updated by an editor "powered by sarcasm, stats, and booze" for all to see.  And states you see.  There are running totals for murders and shootings for the year, month, and week.  There are pie charts of victims and bar charts of violence.  They are informative, they are quirky, and they are fun. That's right, Hey, Jackass! makes murder fun again. Just look at the 30 day stupidity trend for today.  Not only do you get the daily totals of murder, gun murder, and non-fatal shootings over the last thirty days.  Not only do you get a pie chart comparing the number of homicides to the number of non-fatal shootings.  You get fireworks for the Fourth of July. Other awesome charts include: Shot Placement, the Murder Matrix, and the Shot-in-the-Ass-o-Meter.  And some of these go back t...

This is a very nice afternoon’s pastime. Caterpillar Logic is designed as a tool to help train people in inductive reasoning: given a few data points that show some cases that follow a rule and some cases that do not (in this case fourteen multicolored caterpillars, seven that follow the rule and seven that do not), find the rationale behind their categorization.   “I believe that it is a good idea to develop inductive reasoning skills in games,” says the developer, because “scientists use it to form hypotheses and theories.”   The game begins by giving you two sets of seven multicolored caterpillars, each caterpillar has one to six segments and segment can be one of four different colors.   One set follows a simple rule that relates the number and order of the colors on the caterpillars, the other set violates that rule in some way.   By looking at these fourteen examples, you are asked to deduce the rule that fits all of them, and then test your rule by check...