timoni.org

In which my mom knows how it is

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:20:21 -0700

Mom: Who does she work for?
Me: github
Mom: What's that?
Me: hhhhmmm
hard to explain
visit the site and see if you get it
Mom: OK
Often when I visit sites and don't get it I leave a little comment saying just that - "I'm confused!"
Me: haha
where do you leave the comment?
Mom: A lot of sites have a blog or contact info - Support info
Me: awesome
Mom: See this is a site with a lot of instructions - already I am turned off. I don't want to watch videos on "how to"
And I have to download something I may NEVER use - Then I get nervous if I try to delete it from my computer
Me: right, me too
Mom: For one thing the FIRST THING is to just EXPLAIN to me what it is ??? Not tell me to download something.
Me: so weird right?
it's a funny reason why people don't do that
it's because they disagree about what the product SHOULD be
Mom: Well, I'm not downloaded anything until I know what it is and if I want to use it.
It will just take up space on my harddrive

(via Abu Dhabi to build $654 million Louvre | The Luxury...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:32:13 -0700

(via Abu Dhabi to build $654 million Louvre | The Luxury Elitist)

"Wyer (1973) has proposed a model that views the entire judgment process as a set of categorical..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 09:12:30 -0700

“Wyer (1973) has proposed a model that views the entire judgment process as a set of categorical probability judgments similar to those made in a concept identification task. People use different items of information about an object to circumscribe the categories to which the object can belong. The overall scale rating assigned to an object represents the expected value of a subjective probability distribution; i.e., the most representative category of those to which the object could belong. Separate items of information are neither summed nor averaged. Rather, their joint implications depend on the (estimated) conjunctive probability distribution, which may be quite different from the average of the individual distributions.”

- Explaining Negativity Biases in Evaluation and Choice Behavior: Theory and Research by David E. Kanouse

"Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than..."

Sat, 08 Jun 2013 00:18:09 -0700

“Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty.”

- Adaptive bias - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"In Naples in 1868, Vittorio Imbriani published a pamphlet entitled La quinta Promotrice. In this now..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 23:57:20 -0700

“In Naples in 1868, Vittorio Imbriani published a pamphlet entitled La quinta Promotrice. In this now almost forgotten text, he advanced a peculiar theory of art that centered on the color patch or, in Italian, the macchia (the word literally means stain or spot). According to Imbriani, the macchia is “the image of the first distant impression of an object or a scene, the first and characteristic effect, to imprint itself upon the eye of the artist.” It is, in other words, the total compositional and coloristic effect of an image in the split second before the eye begins to parse it for meaning. Imbriani was writing against the academic idealists of his time, who were obsessed with categories of style and execution. “Every painting must contain an idea,” Imbriani wrote, “but a pictorial idea, not just a poetical idea.” And for him, this pictorial idea was a matter of “a particular organization of light and dark from which the work takes its character. And this organization of light and dark, this macchia, is what really moves the spectator… Equally in music it is not the attached words, the libretto, but the character of the melody that produces emotion in the listener…””

- Google’s Macchia – The New Inquiry

"This “feature” exposes our closest friends, confidants and, most terrifyingly, our lovers. We hide..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 08:28:26 -0700

“This “feature” exposes our closest friends, confidants and, most terrifyingly, our lovers. We hide secrets with those connections: a forbidden friend, a secret crush, and even an extramarital affair. In the past, these connections have been transient, or at least appeared to us as so, but now with them visible we are vulnerable to others seeing who we truly are.”

- Snapchat, You’ve Made a Huge Mistake | Etan Zapinsky

I always find it unbelievable that there are people who unthinkingly assume it’s a right to be able to behave badly in private, and yet, somebody just wrote that entire paragraph.

m-a-c-a-r-r-a: chamaleon bowie

Tue, 21 May 2013 12:50:19 -0700

m-a-c-a-r-r-a: chamaleon bowie

"At first glance it may be surmised that the contestants of evolutionary games are the individuals..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 07:27:22 -0700

“At first glance it may be surmised that the contestants of evolutionary games are the individuals present in each generation who directly participate in the game. On reflection however we see that individuals live only through one game cycle, and instead it is the strategies that really contest with one another over the duration of these recursive games.”

- Evolutionary game theory - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(via Neon Luminance ‹ From The Lenz)

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:25:57 -0700

(via Neon Luminance ‹ From The Lenz)

"At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:54:03 -0700

“At no time in the history of humankind have more positions of power been assigned to people who don’t take personal risks. But the idea of incentive in capitalism demands some comparable form of disincentive. In the business world, the solution is simple: Bonuses that go to managers whose firms subsequently fail should be clawed back, and there should be additional financial penalties for those who hide risks under the rug. This has an excellent precedent in the practices of the ancients. The Romans forced engineers to sleep under a bridge once it was completed.”

- Learning to Love Volatility: Nassim Nicholas Taleb on the Antifragile - WSJ.com

"A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant policy, like a highway without exits..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:54:02 -0700

“

A rigid business plan gets one locked into a preset invariant policy, like a highway without exits —hence devoid of optionality. One needs the ability to change opportunistically and “reset” the option for a new option, by ratcheting up, and getting locked up in a higher state. To translate into practical terms, plans need to 1) stay flexible with frequent ways out, and, counter to intuition 2) be very short term, in order to properly capture the long term. Mathematically, five sequential one-year options are vastly more valuable than a single five-year option.

This explains why matters such as strategic planning have never born fruit in empirical reality: planning has a side effect to restrict optionality. It also explains why top-down centralized decisions tend to fail.

”

- UNDERSTANDING IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR CONVEXITY (ANTIFRAGILITY) | Edge.org

"Taleb’s writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the “structured..."

Sat, 11 May 2013 02:54:00 -0700

“Taleb’s writings discuss the error of comparing real-world randomness with the “structured randomness” in quantum physics where probabilities are remarkably computable and games of chance like casinos where probabilities are artificially built. Taleb calls this the “Ludic fallacy”. His argument centers on the idea that predictive models are based on Plato’s Theory of Forms, gravitating towards mathematical purity and failing to take some key ideas into account, such as: the impossibility of possessing all relevant information, that small unknown variations in the data can have a huge impact, and flawed theories/models that are based on empirical data and that fail to consider events that have not taken place but could have taken place. Discussing the Ludic fallacy in The Black Swan, he writes, “The dark side of the moon is harder to see; beaming light on it costs energy. In the same way, beaming light on the unseen is costly in both computational and mental effort.””

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

(via Black And White)

Fri, 10 May 2013 15:59:37 -0700

(via Black And White)

TELEPORTATION NOW

Thu, 02 May 2013 12:59:05 -0700

TELEPORTATION NOW:

Stop what you’re doing right now, scientists, and figure out teleportation.

I started a new Tumblr. Recommendations welcome.

(via ISSUE 25 - UNLESS YOU WILL)

Thu, 02 May 2013 09:42:32 -0700

(via ISSUE 25 - UNLESS YOU WILL)

"The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants;..."

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 09:34:08 -0700

“The human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants; and he must have a very faint perception of its beauty and dignity who does not know this, and who does not further know, that one being is elevated above another, in proportion as he possesses this capability. It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves.”

- The folly of sensationalism: William Wordsworth on the news … in 1798. (via explore-blog)

(via 66 Behind the Scenes Pics from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK -...

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 09:03:05 -0700

(via 66 Behind the Scenes Pics from THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK - Imgur)

Via the New York Subway’s Historical Maps section, the...

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 09:01:08 -0700

Via the New York Subway’s Historical Maps section, the 1912 BMT Route Map.

Vaginas of Science, Vaginas of Justice: Representations of Healthy Female Sexual Functioning in Feminist Porn :: the dirty normal

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:50:11 -0700

Vaginas of Science, Vaginas of Justice: Representations of Healthy Female Sexual Functioning in Feminist Porn :: the dirty normal:

This is a bit outside the normal scope of my blog, but it’s an excellent talk on sexual tropes, narratives, and reality. I absolutely recommend.

(via Blue Willow Video Game Dinnerware Pattern by Olly Moss)

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:06:29 -0700

(via Blue Willow Video Game Dinnerware Pattern by Olly Moss)