The whaaales political spectrum quiz
1. You are analyzing diffraction of fullerenes. Buckyballs are (a) particles (b) waves
Month: June 2017
A partial taxonomy of aesthetic compressibility
Some art doesn’t need to be experienced to be mostly apprehended.a A good enough description suffices. Maybe the thing follows convention too closely, or the author is in a rut. But less redundant art can still internally have a variety of flavors of compressibility: Signposting: Rather than do the thing, loudly proclaim that you’re doing the thing. Candidates: […]
Exposition and guidance by analogy
[expanded from tumblr post] In the above table (from Mary Hesse, Models and Analogies in Science), we notice that there are a lot of apparent correspondences between water waves, sound, and light. The “horizontal” notion of similarity lets us notice that sound echoes and light reflects, or that these things all have some sort of […]
Exercise #6: Exercise fodder
Keep an eye out for large, ordered collections of bite-sized chunks of similar (but not too similar) intellectual material. This is the kind of thing that I like to use for exercises, like a paper with many proposed engineering techniques, a site with many social science results, the many answers to Edge.org questions, or news and commentary […]