This is the most controversial post I have ever written in ten years of blogging. I wrote it because I was very angry at a specific incident. Not meant as a criticism of feminism, so much as of a certain way of operationalizing feminism. A few days ago, in response to a discussion of sexual harassment at MIT, Aaronson reluctantly opened up about his experience as a young man:
One informal analysis suggests short first names are strongly correlated with higher salaries. They are bad in several ways, and modern glyphs are little better. For example, v and w, or m and n. People confuse them all the time, both in reading and in writing.
Even though they share relatively few pixels, they are still identical under rotation, and we can see that. We could confuse them if we were reading upside down, or at an angle, or just confuse them period.
OK, so we now have a set of unique and dissimilar glyphs that are unambiguous about their orientation.
Well, we might want them to be easy to write as well as read. How do we define easy to write? We could have a complicated physiological model about what strokes can easily follow what movements and so on, but we will cop out and say: Rather than unwritable pixels in a grid, our primitives will be little geometric primitives.
The fewer the primitives and the closer to integers or common fractions the positioning of said primitives, the simpler and the better. We throw all these rules in, add a random starting population or better yet a population modeled after the existing alphabet, and begin our genetic algorithm.
What 26 glyphs will we get? Dehaene describes some fascinating and convincing evidence for the first kind of innateness. In one of the most interesting chapters, he argues that the shapes we use to make written letters mirror the shapes that primates use to recognize objects. After all, I could use any arbitrary squiggle to encode the sound at the start of Tree instead of a T.
But actually the shapes of written symbols are strikingly similar across many languages.
It turns out that T shapes are important to monkeys, too. When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object - something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat.
A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those important shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been recycled We did not invent most of our letter shapes, he writes.
They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet.
But who is to say that a butterfly could not dream of a man? You are not the butterfly to say so! Better to ask what manner of beast could dream of a man dreaming a butterfly, and a butterfly dreaming a man.
This is a reasonable objection.Find A+ essays, research papers, book notes, course notes and writing tips.
Millions of students use StudyMode to jumpstart their assignments. The thunder-and-lightning example seems like a bad comparison for this kind of situation, in that the false claim is (1) easily observable to be untrue, and (2) utterly useless to the society that propagates it.
The basic economic theory and math here are obviously spot on. But here’s where it falls short.
The marginal utility of of the 50th channel is not the same as the marginal utility of . It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil it's frankly amazing he got as far as he got.
A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike.
The best way to compare monopoly and perfect competition is the four characteristics of perfect competition: (1) large number of relatively small firms, (2) identical product, (3) freedom of entry and exit, and (4) perfect knowledge.
Published: Mon, 5 Dec When there is competition in firms on the basis of change in price, it is known as price competition. Price competition can involve discounting the price of a product (or range of products) to increase its demand.