The sorites paradox (from Ancient Greek: sōreitēs, meaning “heaped up”) is a paradox that arises from vague predicates.

The paradox of the heap is an example of this paradox which arises when one considers a heap of sand, from which grains are individually removed.

Is it still a heap when only one grain remains?

If not, when did it change from a heap to a non-heap?

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photo { Christian Chaize }

If there’s one topic likely to generate spit-flecked ire, it is the controversy over the potential health threat posed by cell phone signals.

That debate is likely to flare following the publication today of some new ideas on this topic from Bill Bruno, a theoretical biologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

The big question is whether signals from cell phones or cell phone towers can damage biological tissue.

On the one hand, there is a substantial body of evidence in which cell phone signals have supposedly influenced human health and behavior. The list of symptoms includes depression, sleep loss, changes in brain metabolism, headaches and so on.

On the other hand, there is a substantial body of epidemiological evidence that finds no connection between adverse health effects and cell phone exposure.

What’s more, physicists point out that the radiation emitted by cell phones cannot damage biological tissue because microwave photons do not have enough energy to break chemical bonds.

The absence of a mechanism that can do damage means that microwave photons must be safe, they say.

That’s been a powerful argument. Until now.

Today, Bruno points out that there is another way in which photons could damage biological tissue, which has not yet been accounted for.

He argues that the traditional argument only applies when the number of photons is less than one in a volume of space equivalent to a cubic wavelength.

When the density of photons is higher than this, other effects can come into play because photons can interfere constructively.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

photo { George Tice }

In a notification sent to all service providers and hosting companies in Turkey on Thursday (28 April), the Telecommunication Communication Presidency (TİB) forwarded a list of banned words and terms. (…)

[Some of the banned words:] Adrianne, Animal, Sister-in-law, Blond, Beat, Enlarger, Nude, Crispy, Escort, Skirt, Fire, Girl, Free, Gay, Homemade, Liseli (’high school student’).

{ Bianet | Continue reading }

This study sets out to focus on the nature of changes some major interjections have gone through. (…)

Historically, interjections have been regarded as marginal to language. Latin grammarians described them as non-words, independent of syntax, signifying only feelings or states of mind. Nineteenth-century linguists regarded them as paralinguistic, even non-linguistic phenomena. (…)

Traditional classification of interjections to primary and secondary might help us to narrow down our focus. In keeping with this classification, the words from other word classes (e.g., hell, boy, and Jesus), when used as interjections, construct the category of secondary interjections, and all the other interjections that have already appeared in the dictionary such as wow, oops, ouch, yuck, and whoa form the primary group. The latter interjections are, in point of fact, emotion-expressive so much so that they cannot be expressed by means of other words or phrases.

{ I Will Wow You! Pragmatic Interjections Revisited | Studies in Literature and language | Continue reading | PDF }

Is it true “W” can be used as a vowel?

Sure. Try “how,” which is phonetically equivalent to “hou,” as in house.

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that have occurred just five times during the past 540 million years.

Each of these “Big Five” saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct. (…)

Biologists estimate that within the past 500 years, at least 80 mammal species have gone extinct–from a starting total of 5,570 species. The team’s estimate for the average extinction rate for mammals is less than two extinctions every million years, far lower than the current extinction rate for mammals. (…)

If currently threatened species–those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable–actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in as little as 3 to 22 centuries.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

It has been estimated that the earth alone could accommodate twenty million times its present population, living at 120 per square meter in a 2000-story building covering the entire earth. It would take us 890 years, at our present rate of growth, to get to that point.

{ via EconLib | Continue reading }

painting { Eric Thor Sandberg }

Criminology has yet to achieve full recognition as an independent discipline. (…)

When criminology began to make claims as an independent discipline, it came under heavy attack and the knowledge it produces was criticized as a producer of and product of power–knowledge. (…)

As a case in point, political violence and armed conflict have traditionally been neglected by criminologists, as some consider them to lie outside the realm of the discipline. Criminology has shied away from the study of atrocities, genocide, human rights violations, crimes against humanity, and war crimes, particularly from a perspective that centres on imbalances of social power within societies. However, since the late 1990s and particularly since the beginning of the new millennium, criminologists have been looking beyond terrorism and have started to investigate a multiplicity of topics, such as genocide, torture, child soldiers, war, crimes against humanity, and so on.

{ Muse | Continue reading }

{ $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping) }

People who are more aware of their own heart-beat have superior time perception skills.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

artwork { Ellsworth Kelly, Atlantic, 1956 | Oil on canvas on two panels }

The self-organizing strategies of eusocial insects are now well known and well studied in biology and applications to computation are abundant.

One of the more remarkable behaviors observed is the ability of rather simple, unintelligent agents (individual insects) to coordinate their behavior to establish a rather fluid and adaptive behavior on the colony level. The phenomenon of stigmergy (communication via the environment) has now been modeled and applied in artificial simulations to achieve similar results among rather simple artificial agents cooperating in multi-agent systems.

However, many of these applications focus on homogeneous colonies, where each agent has the same behavioral capabilities. Nonetheless, observations of insects show that in many colonies the individuals are not always homogeneous. Colonies consist of heterogeneous agents, whether these agents display morphological differences (i.e. distinct castes) or merely behavioral differences. The effects of this stratification of agents in a colony is referred to as division of labor (DOL) or by the term polyethism. (…)

The experiment detailed below involves a colony of artificial ants engaged in a foraging task.

{ Chris Marriott and Carlos Gershenson, Polyethism in a colony of artificial ants, 2011 | Arvix | Continue reading }

strip { Will Eisner }

What is protected in the fashion world via the law and legislation, and what is not? Blakely: The main protection fashion designers have is over their trademark: their logo, their name. Source is protected; that’s why you hear about raids on pirates, who have made copies of Louis Vuitton bags, Canal St. in New York (NYC), Santee Alley in Los Angeles (LA). Have control of their name; have copyright protection of all the two-dimensional designs that go into the production of a garment. Textile design with a certain pattern–automatically qualify for copyright protection of that design. What they don’t own are any of the three-dimensional designs they end up creating. The stuff you see prancing out on a runway are actually up for grabs. Anybody can copy any aspects of any of those designs and get into no trouble with the law. Those designs are not particularly utilitarian–a word that comes up a lot in this industry–utilitarian stuff tends not to be protected legally. Something has to be considered a work of art in order to be considered for copyright protection. The courts decided long ago that they did not want any fashion designers owning such utilitarian designs as shirts, blouses, pants, belts, lapels. Don’t want somebody owning a monopoly–basically what a copyright gives you. (…)

Standard view would be: If I think my design is going to be copied, and copied quickly–which is what has happened to some extent because the copying ability better and the speed faster–then you’d think people would have less incentive to create new and better designs. That does not seem to be the case in the fashion industry. Why? Several reasons. One, from the beginning, copyright has both given artists an advantage and also taken something away. What it takes away from creators is access to other creative designs. Copyright holders may own what they have, but they cannot sample freely from others around them. Huge problem in the film and music industry. The fashion industry doesn’t suffer from this problem because every design that has ever been made is within a type of public domain. It is the raw material they can sample from to make their new work. Rich archive. The history of fashion, every hem length, every curved seam, every style is available to sample from. Not just stealing–sort of a curatorial responsibility. They are curating. Different gestures, different design elements from the past. Inevitably creating something new.

{ Johanna Blakley on Fashion and Intellectual Property | EconTalk | Continue reading }

photo { Bianca Jagger by Andy Warhol }

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 emotional cause that I have found just universal among people who commit serious violence, lethal violence is the phenomenon of feeling overwhelmed by feelings of shame and humiliation.

{ A forensic look at the tense history of murder, and a modern rethink of the psychology of shame and honour in preventing it | Continue reading }

It is difficult to understand the importance of shame in modern societies because we live inside an ethos that is highly individualistic and focused on exterior matters. When interior matters are viewed, thought and perception are recognized, but little attention is given to emotions and relationships. This essay focuses on the social-emotional world, and proposes that shame should be considered the master emotion.

{ New English Review | Continue reading }

Eagleman has collected hundreds of stories like his, and they almost all share the same quality: in life-threatening situations, time seems to slow down. (…)

Eagleman is thirty-nine now and an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine, in Houston. (…)

The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Yet “brain time,” as Eagleman calls it, is intrinsically subjective. “Try this exercise,” he suggests in a recent essay. “Put this book down and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move.” There’s no evidence of any gaps in your perception—no darkened stretches like bits of blank film—yet much of what you see has been edited out. Your brain has taken a complicated scene of eyes darting back and forth and recut it as a simple one: your eyes stare straight ahead. Where did the missing moments go?

The question raises a fundamental issue of consciousness: how much of what we perceive exists outside of us and how much is a product of our minds?

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

photo { Rodney Graham }

Hegel wrote in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right that the owl of Minerva flies only at night. It hoots at insomniacs. I know. I’m one. (…)

Insomnia has intrigued thinkers since the ancients, an interest that continues today, especially in Europe. (…)

Philosophy is no friend of sleep. In his Laws (circa 350 BC), Plato platonized, “When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who loves life and wisdom will take no more sleep than is necessary for health.” (…) In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche preached that the high goal of good Europeans “is wakefulness itself.”

Aristotle said all animals sleep. In the 20th century, the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran added in On the Heights of Despair (first published in 1934): “Only humanity has insomnia.” Emmanuel Levinas, author of the erotic and metaphysical Totality and Infinity (1961), imagined philosophy, all of it, to be a call to “infinite responsibility, to an untiring wakefulness, to a total insomnia.” (…)

The first thing you learn about insomnia is that it sees in the dark. The second is that it sees nothing.

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

We all know that we don’t get enough sleep. But how much sleep do we really need? Until about 15 years ago, one common theory was that if you slept at least four or five hours a night, your cognitive performance remained intact; your body simply adapted to less sleep. But that idea was based on studies in which researchers sent sleepy subjects home during the day — where they may have sneaked in naps and downed coffee.

Enter David Dinges, the head of the Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory at the Hospital at University of Pennsylvania, who has the distinction of depriving more people of sleep than perhaps anyone in the world.

In what was the longest sleep-restriction study of its kind, Dinges and his lead author, Hans Van Dongen, assigned dozens of subjects to three different groups for their 2003 study: some slept four hours, others six hours and others, for the lucky control group, eight hours — for two weeks in the lab. (…)

For most of us, eight hours of sleep is excellent and six hours is no good, but what about if we split the difference? (…)

Belenky’s nine-hour subjects performed much like Dinges’s eight-hour ones. But in the seven-hour group, their response time on the P.V.T. slowed and continued to do so for three days, before stabilizing at lower levels than when they started. (…)

Not every sleeper is the same, of course: Dinges has found that some people who need eight hours will immediately feel the wallop of one four-hour night, while other eight-hour sleepers can handle several four-hour nights before their performance deteriorates. There is a small portion of the population — he estimates it at around 5 percent or even less — who, for what researchers think may be genetic reasons, can maintain their performance with five or fewer hours of sleep. (There is also a small percentage who require 9 or 10 hours.)

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

The goal to be reached is the mind’s insight into what knowing is. Impatience asks for the impossible, wants to reach the goal without the means of getting there. The length of the journey has to be borne with, for every moment is necessary; and again we must halt at every stage, for each is itself a complete individual form, and is fully and finally considered only so far as its determinate character is taken and dealt with as a rounded and concrete whole, or only so far as the whole is looked at in the light of the special and peculiar character which this determination gives it.

{ Hegel, The Phenomenology of the Spirit, 8, 29, 1807 | Continue reading }

images { 1. Robert Mapplethorpe | 2 }

The world’s 6,000 or so modern languages may have all descended from a single ancestral tongue spoken by early African humans between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago, a new study suggests.

The finding, published Thursday in the journal Science, could help explain how the first spoken language emerged, spread and contributed to the evolutionary success of the human species. (…)

The origin of early languages is fuzzier. Truly ancient languages haven’t left empirical evidence that scientists can study. And many linguists believe it is hard to say anything definitive about languages prior to 8,000 years ago, as their relationships would have become jumbled over the millennia.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

The basic concept is that we think writers should be paid for their work.

{ Why the Times Pays Writers Even When It Doesn’t Have To | Forbes | full story }

images { 1 | 2 }

The American painter Barnett Newman once said that an artist gets from aesthetics what a bird gets from ornithology—nothing. (…)

There are things in our context that we readily recognize to be art because they are sufficiently like it in relevant respects—even though they may not “look like art” in every respect. What is this form of life in which this likeness can be seen? (…)

The notion that “vision itself has its history,” to use the words of Heinrich Wölfflin, has been one of the longest-lasting and deepest- seated principles of art history, even if it has sometimes been somewhat subterranean.

{ Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture | Continue reading | PDF }

photo { Richard Ross, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, 1986 }

It has become harder to escape feeling like a tourist. Part of this is because cities are becoming more indistinguishable. In his essay “The City in the Age of Touristic Reproduction” philosopher Boris Groys notes how the local distinctions that once made foreign destinations exotic — the architectural or culinary peculiarities, the unique monuments, the cultural idiosyncrasies — have all become exportable signifiers, rapidly transmissible around the globe. This dissemination of local ideas, Groys argues, establishes a worldwide uniform city in places that were once distinct.

{ The New Inquiry | Continue reading }

image { Olivier Laric, Versions, 2010 }

bonus (1:04 mark):

A concept is not at all something that is a given. Moreover, a concept is not the same thing as thought: one can very well think without concepts, and everyone who does not do philosophy still thinks, I believe, but does not think through concepts–if you accept the idea of a concept as the product of an activity or an original creation.


I would say that the concept is a system of singularities appropriated from a thought flow. A philosopher is someone who invents concepts. Is he an intellectual? No, in my opinion. (…)

Philosophy arises with the action that consists of creating concepts. For me, there are as many creations in the invention of a concept as in the creation by a great painter or musician.

{ Gilles Deleuze, Cours de Vincennes on Leibniz | Continue reading }

Science is not always about success. Most research projects are unsuccessful stories producing ambiguous or ‘null’-results that don’t lead to unambiguous conclusion. Nevertheless this ‘failed’ research provides useful and valuable information for fellow scientists. Currently only research projects with positive results and clear conclusions have the chance to get published in scientific journals. Due to these publication practices a lot information is lost for the scientific community and additionally scientists find themselves in the dilemma of having to overinterpret data.

We have set out to change this. With the Journal of Unsolved Questions (JUnQ) we provide a means to gather ‘null’-result research  and open problems.

{ JUnQ.info | Continue reading }