George E. P. Box is famous for the quote: “all models are wrong, but some are useful.” […]

In my experience, most models outside of physics are heuristic models. The models are designed as caricatures of reality, and built to be wrong while emphasizing or communicating some interesting point. Nobody intends these models to be better and better approximations of reality, but a toolbox of ideas. Although sometimes people fall for their favorite heuristic models, and start to talk about them as if they are reflecting reality, I think this is usually just a short lived egomania. As such, pointing out that these models are wrong is an obvious statement: nobody intended them to be not wrong. Usually, when somebody actually calls such a model “wrong” they actually mean “it does not properly highlight the point it intended to” or “the point it is highlighting is not of interest to reality”. As such, if somebody says that your heuristic model is wrong, they usually mean that it’s not useful and Box’s defense is of no help.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are abstractions, these sort of models are rigorous mathematical statements about specific types of structures. These models are right and true of their subjects in any reasonable definition of the words. They are as right or true as the statement that there are infinite number of primes; or that in Euclidean geometry, the tree angles of a triangle sum to two right angles. When somebody says that an abstraction is wrong, they mean one of two things:

1. It is mathematically false. […]

2. Or, the structure you are applying it to does not meet the requirements of the abstraction. For example, in general relativity, space is non-Euclidean, so triangles don’t sum to 180 degrees.

{ Theory, Evolution, and Game Groups | Continue reading }

I think you are missing out on some ideas on complexity. […] What makes you think that something mathematical is comprehensible? You already invoked one simple form of incomprehension: undecidability in computing. […] As to a belief that the universe is not “mathematical”: well, what else could it possibly be? Many mathematicians define mathematics as the sum-total of all possibility; to say that something isn’t mathematical is tantamount to saying it isn’t possible. Since there is nothing else that it could be, by law of excluded middle, it must be.

{ Linas Vepstas | Continue reading }

Hmmm, no edit-button to correct my post. Some footnotes, then: […]

Box’s quote is kind-of the mirror image of Kolmogorov complexity, which states that a model is useful only if it is smaller than the thing being modelled, and, what’s more, that there are things that cannot be modeled.

{ Linas Vepstas | Continue reading }

Man arrested after bringing chain saw to bar fight.

1,000 men caught trying to pay a CGI child to perform sex acts online.

Tomahawk-throwing champion who chased thief from home: ‘I hit what I aim for.’ [Thanks Tim]

China discovers that pollution makes it really hard to spy on people.

Tests of Google’s autonomous vehicles in California and Nevada suggests they already outperform human drivers.

Alligator shows up at Chicago airport baggage claim.

A new study reveals how Somali piracy is financed.

Are you more likely to click headlines that are phrased as a question?

Cheerleader effect: Why people are more beautiful in groups.

The cheater’s high - how being bad feels good.

6 Psychological Effects of Washing Your Hands.

The incidence of most cancers increases with age but then mysteriously drops. Now one biomedical engineer has worked out why.

New ligament found in humans’ knees.

Japanese scientists create Rock-paper-scissors robot that wins 100% of the time.

The number of smartphones shipping with fingerprint sensors will rise from 46 million this year to 525 million by 2017, the report says. Only four companies of any scale operate in this industry.

50 Tough Books for Extreme Readers.

Overview of the New Patent Law of the United States.

The Prison Guard With a Gift for Cracking Gang Codes.

Introduction to Game Theory [PDF] [more]

Analysing the Bond movie — three approaches.

Umberto Eco, The Narrative Structure of Ian Fleming, 1969 [PDF]

Steven Soderbergh: For me there’s no question that cinematically ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE is the best Bond film and the only one worth watching repeatedly for reasons other than pure entertainment.

Increasingly, people expect to get all their social needs met by their spouse or partner. This is a prescription for disaster.

The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry.

Five Reasons why Mermaids Can’t Physically Exist: 4: They would be constipated.

Michael H. Rohde, From Below

Lost Unicorn. [Thanks Tim]

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, honey bees pollinate 80% of our flowering crops, and are thus essential for the production of 1/3 of our food. […] But for more than 2 million Americans, bees are a dangerous threat. Somewhere between 1% and 7% of human beings are allergic to insect venoms, with their symptoms ranging from mild overreactions to full-blown anaphylactic shock. For those with bee allergies, even the slightest sting can lead to a fight for life. Even more troubling is that, in half of all fatal sting allergy cases, victims had no previous major reactions to venom. Nearly 100 Americans die every year from bee stings. […]

Allergies are defined as ‘hypersensitive immune responses’—or, in colloquial terms, odd moments when our immune systems flip out. Anaphylaxis is the whole-body manifestation of an allergy, which can range from something as minor as hives to sharp drops in blood pressure and even cardiac arrest. You don’t have an allergic reaction the first time you come in contact with an allergen; instead, like with viruses or other potential invaders, your body takes an immunological picture so it can remember the allergen later. This is what is known as the adaptive immune response, and it’s usually a good thing—when you get the chicken pox, for example, your adaptive immune system remembers what the disease looks like, and can find and kill it should you ever be re-exposed. But when it comes to allergies, the adaptive immune system goes too far. The next time it detects allergens, it sends out hordes of IgE antibodies to destroy them. These IgE antibodies wreak havoc in our bodies—through cascading immunological pathways, IgE antibodies cause the release of histamine and other inflammatory compounds and can lead to anaphylaxis.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

Even though boys express a wider range of emotions than girls do as infants, boys are typically discouraged from showing their emotions as they grow older due to traditional ideas about masculinity and gender roles. Crying frequency between boys and girls shows little difference until the age of eleven or twelve when girls overtake boys. 

Being told that “big boys don’t cry,” boys are socialized against any display of strong emotion considered inappropriate while crying is specifically targeted as being “feminine” behaviour. There can be enormous culture differences over when and under what circumstances men and women are allowed to cry but men are often expected to be more stoic and unemotional in most situations. […]

Though crying among men seems more tolerated, there are still strong biases against men crying in public. In a 2001 study of undergraduate males in the United States, only 23 percent of males reported crying when feeling helpless as opposed to 58 percent of females with similar sex differences being noted in the United Kingdom and Israel.

{ Psychology Today | Continue reading }

photo { Stephen DiRado, Martha’s Vineyard/Beach People: Aquinnah, MA. }

{ The bathroom, which became unisex over time. Serge Becker, Area’s art director: “We beat out a door at some point between the men’s and women’s room and ended up just leaving it.” }

{ Dolph Lundgren and Grace Jones at Area’s confinement-themed party }

{ Invitation for the Natural History party | Photos from Area: 1983–1987 | More: Inside Area Club }

According to the Standard Model of particle physics, the universe should be empty. Matter and antimatter, which are identical except for their opposite electric charges, seem to be produced in equal parts during particle interactions and decays. However, matter and antimatter instantly annihilate each other upon contact, and so equal amounts of each would have meant a wholesale annihilation of both shortly after the Big Bang. The existence of galaxies, planets and people illustrates that somehow, a small surplus of matter survived this canceling process. If that hadn’t happened, “the universe would be void,” Schönert said.

The explanation for the survival of some matter may lie in subatomic particles called neutrinos. These particles might have a special property that would give rise to neutrino-less double beta decay.

{ Quanta | Continue reading }

What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.

And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, terms “a de-skilling of the crew.” […]

Doctors use computers to make diagnoses and to perform surgery. Wall Street bankers use them to assemble and trade financial instruments. Architects use them to design buildings. Attorneys use them in document discovery. And it’s not only professional work that’s being computerized. Thanks to smartphones and other small, affordable computers, we depend on software to carry out many of our everyday routines. We launch apps to aid us in shopping, cooking, socializing, even raising our kids. We follow turn-by-turn GPS instructions. We seek advice from recommendation engines on what to watch, read, and listen to. We call on Google, or Siri, to answer our questions and solve our problems. More and more, at work and at leisure, we’re living our lives inside glass cockpits.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

related { 20-Somethings Find No Problem with Texting and Answering Calls in Business Meetings }

Almost all rich countries are rich because they exploit technological progress. They have moved the bulk of their labor force out of agriculture and into cities, where knowhow can be shared more easily. Their families have fewer children and educate them more intensively, thereby facilitating further technological progress.

Poor countries need to go through a similar change in order to become rich: reduce farm employment, become more urban, have fewer children, and keep those children that they have in school longer. If they do, the doors to prosperity will open. And isn’t that already happening?

Let us compare, for example, Brazil in 2010 with the United Kingdom in 1960. Brazil in 2010 was 84.3% urban; its fertility rate was 1.8 births per woman; its labor force had an average of 7.2 years of schooling; and its university graduates accounted for 5.2% of potential workers. These are better social indicators than the United Kingdom had in 1960. At that time, the UK was 78.4% urban; its fertility rate was 2.7; its labor force had six years of schooling on average, and its university graduates accounted for less than 2% of potential workers.

Brazil is not a unique case: Colombia, Tunisia, Turkey, and Indonesia in 2010 compare favorably to Japan, France, the Netherlands, and Italy, respectively, in 1960. […]

So today’s emerging-market economies should be richer than today’s advanced economies were back then, right?

Wrong – and by a substantial margin. Per capita GDP at constant prices was 140% higher in Britain in 1960 than in Brazil in 2010. It was 80% higher in Japan back then than in Colombia today, 42% higher in old France than in current Tunisia, 250% higher in the old Netherlands than in current Turkey, and 470% higher in old Italy than in current Indonesia.

{ Project Syndicate | Continue reading }

There’s a lot of bots on twitter. […] A prime example is @StealthMountain, which searches for people using the phrase “sneak peak” and replies with “I think you mean ’sneak peek’”. Effectively, a coder somehwere has used twitter to greatly leverage his ability to be a grammar Nazi. But worse, it appears that the bot exists just to rile people. While most people seem to take this correction in stride, @StealthMountain’s favorites list (which is linked from his bio line) is populated with some of the recipients’ more colorful reactions. You too, dear reader, can laugh at those victims, and their absurd, futile anger towards the machine.

At the most outrightly hostile end of the spectrum, we find the now defunct bot @EnjoyTheFilm, which searched for mentions of particular films or television shows, and replied with plot spoilers.

{ Aaron Beppu | Continue reading }

Moreover, the broom by no means removes the dust perfectly even from the carpet to which it is assiduously applied. At any rate, when suction is applied to the swept carpet a good deal more dust is seen to be extracted. This is very well illustrated in the application of the simple dust extractor known as the “Witch,” a model of which has recently been submitted to us for trial by the Witch Dust Extractor Co. of Temple Row, Birmingham.

{ The Lancet, 1904 | via Neurocritic | Continue reading }

art { Dorothea Tanning, Canapé en temps de pluie (Rainy-Day Canapé), 1970 }

related { Where does the “witches flying on broomsticks” thing come from? }

Fishing operations have expanded to virtually all corners of the ocean over the past century. […] How badly are we overfishing the oceans? Are fish populations going to keep shrinking each year — or could they recover? Those are surprisingly contentious questions, and there seem to be a couple of schools of thought here.

The pessimistic view […] is that we may be facing “The End of Fish.” One especially dire 2006 study in Science warned that many commercial ocean fish stocks were on pace to “collapse” by mid-century. […]

Other experts have countered that this view is far too alarmist. […] Overfishing isn’t inevitable. We can fix it.

Both sides make valid points — but the gloomy view is hard to dismiss. […] One reason the debate about overfishing is so contentious is that it’s hard to get a precise read on the state of the world’s marine fisheries.

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { Playboy, Miss December 1971 }

Insect-inspired flying robot handles collisions, goes where other robots can’t.

Australia’s highest court on Wednesday denied worker’s compensation to a bureaucrat who was injured while having sex in her hotel room on a business trip.

Latest weapon for American police: GPS bullets that can track the location of a suspect’s car.

Florida Cops Made Millions Dealing Cocaine.

Eye tracking technology has reconfirmed what women have known all along: that people look at their sexual body parts more and faces less when evaluating their appearance.

Psychologist finds that unrealistic pessimists less likely to take preventive action after receiving good news.

Breast milk protein may be key to protecting babies from HIV infection.

Broccoli could help improve cancer treatment and cure radiation sickness.

Which is healthier - coffee or smoothies? It seems obvious that the answer must be a smoothie. But when you look into the scientific studies they reveal something much more surprising.

5 Crazy Cures that Actually Work.

Want To See An Enzyme? Check Inside Your Nose.

Problematic Labelling: The Case of “Drunkorexia.”

Why Hot Water Freezes Faster Than Cold—Physicists Solve the Mpemba Effect.

Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

Say you’re a supervillian. Your goal is not to take over the world, but to create more unpleasantness. So you set out to create a device that would ensnare normal, rational people and turn them into ranting lunatics. What would your Argument Machine look like? How would it work?

I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling.

How would an astronaut falling into a black hole would die.

15 years ago, President Clinton signed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended copyright protection. As a result, the great creative output of the 20th century, from Superman to “Gone With the Wind” to Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” to Mickey Mouse, were locked down for an extra 20 years. Will they do it again?

On Malcolm Gladwell’s recent book, David and Goliath, which promotes the idea that apparent disadvantages are often actually advantages, and in particular suggests that dyslexia might be Good For You.

Can we excavate evidence of witchcraft and witches?

Three and a half thought experiments in philosophy of mind.

Kanji are the adopted logographic Chinese characters that are used in the modern Japanese writing system along with hiragana, katakana, Hindu-Arabic numerals, and the occasional use of the Latin alphabet.

How To Get Happy RIGHT NOW: Sex, Exercise, Socialize.

The latest so-called “controversy” in Toronto revolves around a 23-year-old girl who is willing to go on a date with practically anyone, in order to score a free grilled octopus.

New York City soundscape, circa 1930

Japanese artist makes mini 3D masterpieces out of coffee froth.

Have you ever wished your undergarments could be more social? The tweeting bra.

3 photos of people posing with their own hearts.

Selfies at Funerals. [Thanks Tim]

Our ability to exhibit self-control to avoid cheating or lying is significantly reduced over the course of a day, making us more likely to be dishonest in the afternoon than in the morning, according to findings published in Psychological Science.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Johan Rosenmunthe }

Shares of Internet companies are soaring again, and signs of pre-2000 exuberance can be seen in Silicon Valley and the nearby area. Home prices in San Francisco and surrounding counties rose more than 15% in the past year. Office rents in San Francisco are 23% above their 2008 peak. […]

Pinterest, an electronic-scrapbook service that began testing ads this month, said Wednesday that it had raised $225 million from venture-capital firms. Pinterest didn’t need the money; the company said it hadn’t spent any of the $200 million it raised in February when it was valued at $2.5 billion.

The new investment values the three-year-old company at $3.8 billion, a 52% jump in eight months.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

With every quarterly earnings call, my Twitter feed lights up with jokes about how Amazon continues to grow its revenue and make no profits and how trusting investors continue to rewards the company for it. The apotheosis of that line of thoughts is a quote from Slate’s Matthew Yglesias earlier this year: “Amazon, as best I can tell, is a charitable organization being run by elements of the investment community for the benefit of consumers.”

It’s a great quote, one that got so much play Amazon even featured it in its Annual Letter to Shareholders. But like much of the commentary about Amazon, it’s a misreading of Amazon’s business model.

[…]

If Amazon has so many businesses that do make a profit, then why is it still showing quarterly losses, and why has even free cash flow decreased in recent years?

Because Amazon has boundless ambition. It wants to eat global retail.

{ Eugene Wei | Continue reading }

{ Velvet Underground Horrifies Psychiatrists, NY Times, 1966 }

Unagi Travel, the “Japan Travel Agency for Stuffed Animals.”

The drink is designed to taste like kissing an older man who has just shaved and smoked a cigarette.

Miley Cyrus files lawsuit over sex doll. [Thanks TG]

In basic literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving skills, the new study shows, younger Americans are at or near the bottom of the standings among advanced countries.

Salsa overtakes ketchup as America’s No. 1 condiment, tortillas outsell burger and hot dog buns.

In Japan, sales of adult diapers exceed those for babies.

Washing your hands makes you optimistic.

Your body language doesn’t only reflect your mood, it causes it.

Reading this in a meeting? Women are twice as likely as men to be offended by smartphone use.

Recipe For A Happy Marriage: The 7 Scientific Secrets.

A team of scientists has explained the physics behind why beer in a bottle transforms into an overflowing mass of foam when the bottle receives a vertical tap on the mouth.

The science of ice, melting, and chilling (as it pertains to drinks).

The CIA’s Most Highly-Trained Spies Weren’t Even Human.

Trees mark the spot of buried gold. Tiny bits of the precious metal in eucalyptus leaves indicate much more belowground.

The world’s oldest bank struggles to survive.

The movie “Gravity” depicts two astronauts fighting to survive while floating in the void of space. German astronaut Ulrich Walter explains what the film got right and wrong.

Before we take a look at where Freud was right, let’s consider where he went wrong.

Lady Gaga‘s Telephone music video was a strange but significant addition to our collection of material that in one or another way signaled a move beyond, post, or after postmodernism.

Until now theorists have predicted that information can always spread until it saturates a network to the point where everybody has received it. These predictions come from models based on our understanding of diseases and the way they percolate through a population. The basic assumption is that information spreads in the same way. Not so fast, say Chuang and co. Information is different.

Don’t expect self-driving cars to take over the roads anytime soon. Here’s what carmakers are really working on.

The Decline of Wikipedia.

Sasha Frere-Jones on Morrissey’s “Autobiography.”

13+ Things You Shouldn’t Eat At A Restaurant.

List of cognitive biases.

suckmydicknewyorker.tumblr.com [Thanks GG]

Earlier studies already showed that people that just experienced or recalled an embarrassing situation — that is a public action that observers could consider as foolish or inappropriate — often feel motivated to avoid social contact or to repair their image. Sunglasses and restorative cosmetics could help with that. A team of researchers now investigated the actual effectiveness of these coping strategies. […]

Hiding the face and repairing the face weren’t equally effective in these experiments. Face restoring products seemed to relieve feelings of embarrassment and restore willingness to interact with others. Simply hiding the face didn’t seem to help.

{ United-Academics | Continue reading }