Sometimes posts start with no more than a good post title. Like this one. Actually, okay, this post started with some thoughts I’ve been having about different ways of perceiving and handling information. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. In fact, one of my first rants on this […]
Category: thoughts
Social context in the Monkeysphere
I’m going to cheat here, and respond to one of Beemer’s comments in the blog itself rather than with another comment. Mostly because he brought up some points I wanted to address but hadn’t gotten around to. This is what I meant when I mentioned that I had a whole big ball of ideas that […]
Truth vs. Context
Beemer had an interesting response to my last post, which he called Truth vs. Context, and I’m going to steal that for the title of this post. As a warning, I have a ton of ground to cover, and this entry is probably going to span at least four posts, if not more. Just the […]
Context in modern physics
I mentioned that modern physics actually demonstrates the importance of context. This is a total aside, which is why I’m putting it in a separate post (think of this as a long DFW-esque footnote), but while I was contrasting the “objective physical reality” with the contextual social world, I realized that the objective physical reality […]
The Ultimatum Game
I mentioned that there would be cases when people would answer the question “Do you want $2 or $0?” with “$0”. This is what actually happens in the Ultimatum Game, described here, with references. The basic idea is that there are two players, asked to split up a pot of money, say $10. The first […]
Conservative postmodernism
I was struck while reading Travels in Hyperreality a few months ago by the realization that the conservatives had appropriated the techniques of the Academic Left such as postmodernism and deconstructionism, and put them into the service of the conservative movement. I find this supremely ironic, given the utter disdain with which conservatives view postmodernism, […]
Interesting discussion
Dave Policar has been having some interesting discussions over on his journal about religion and politics, thinking about some of the same issues I’ve been struggling with. The comments and discussion on yesterday’s post were particularly interesting. Several people including myself got involved with a variety of viewpoints. There are some really tangled issues here […]
New directions
This post is to give people a heads up on the sorts of things I’m planning to write about here for the next little bit. And to give people the opportunity to provide feedback, if they so desire. This is pretty much the result of a long conversation I had with Brad and Jill before […]
HP sucks
After poking around for a while, I finally settled on the HP DV1000 laptop. It was cheaper, but still had all the functionality I was looking for. And although the Powerbooks are lustworthy, given that all of my current jobs involve Windows programming, I couldn’t do it. So I put in the order at hp.com […]
The Incredibles as a commentary on gifted education
I liked this New York Times article, deconstructing the Incredibles as a commentary on the debate within education on how to handle gifted children. Read it soon before it becomes for pay (or email me because I downloaded a copy). The article also refers to the short story Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, which danah […]
