the data are wanting

zachklein:

“For most of its history basketball has measured not so much what is important as what is easy to measure — points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocked shots — and these measurements have warped perceptions of the game.”

I read the excellent article about Shane Battier titled The No-Stats All-Star and I couldn’t help but consider how the same misguided obsession with easy-to-measure statistics has influenced the design of social networking applications and rendered many of them ineffective.

Is Facebook or Tumblr really more useful when you have more friends?

(I guess no)

So is the problem an inappropriate preoccupation with the stastical? Or simply with the wrong numbers? How do we go about determining the right ones?

20 Feb 2009

tmblg:

(via thisrecording)

Newton’s Naturalis Principia Mathematica

One semester in college, I worked as a personal assistant to the director of our library. One of the rare joys of the position was being responsible for the ball park appraisal of volumes being added to, or put on display from, our rare books collection (for the purposes of insurance.)

Highlights include handling first editions of Gustave Doré’s illustrated Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as the first volume of the second edition of the Principia, published in 1713, which added Newton’s own corrections as well as his infamous concluding General Scholium, easily worth $50,000 in solid condition.

The first lemma of Book I (On the Motion of Bodies), in which Newton lays the groundwork for the mathematical concept of a “limit” (and gives rise to the possibility of his Calculus) remains one of the singly most formative fragments of thought in my academic life. It reads:

Quantities, and also ratios of quantities, which in “any finite time” constantly tend to equality, and which before the end of that time approach so close to one another that their difference is less than any given quantity, become ultimately equal.

And an excerpt from one of my (many) papers in which it was prominently featured:

Lemma 1 recasts the description of motion as a strictly geometric problem. We can now describe what is happening in an indefinitely small division of time without ever having to actually find such an instant or attempt to go there. The limit effectively achieves Galileo’s ‘one fell swoop’ and strips away the complication of flowing time. We are now able to freeze-frame our previously cinematographical perception of phenomena and extract the underlying ratiometric intelligibility as pure planar geometry. The force displacing a body along a curvilinear path has entered into proportion with a given line in a planar figure.

Consequently, by means of Lemma 1, acting as a revolution of perspective, we find ourselves removed from inherently empirical motion (as an a posteriori synthesis of both space and time) and again in the synthetic a priori comforts of pure mathematics.

16 Feb 2009

Instead of applying observation to the things we wished to know, we have chosen rather to imagine them. Advancing from one ill founded supposition to another, we have at last bewildered ourselves amidst a multitude of errors. These errors becoming prejudices, are, of course, adopted as principles, and we thus bewilder ourselves more and more…there is but one remedy…to forget all that we have learned.

Abbé de Condillac, as cited in Lavoisier’s preface to his Elements.

16 Feb 2009

Yet particular facts are never scientific; only generalization can establish science. But here we must avoid a double stumbling block; for if excess of detail is anti-scientific, excessive generalization creates an ideal science no longer connected with reality.

Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine

16 Feb 2009

Gratuitous-Photobooth-Pastiche-Of-Yourself-Wednesday.

11 Feb 2009

magicmolly:

Idea! Fortune cookies with little jpegs of Philip Roth’s face instead of fortunes.

I’m reminded of a plan I hatched junior year in college to market tiny toaster-oven croissants with Pascal’s Pensees baked into the middle. Following their inevitable success, I’d launch a spin-off: frozen mini-bagels containing Maimonides aphorisms.

10 Feb 2009

I was a precocious child.

10 Feb 2009

2 Feb 2009

tumblog, take six.

2 Feb 2009

Nothing could be more original, nothing more characteristic of oneself than to nourish oneself on others. But one must digest them. The lion is composed of assimilated sheep.

Paul Valéry

2 Feb 2009

From the archives.

2 Feb 2009

Teaching, you learn an enormous amount. The cliche turns out to be true: the teacher learns a lot more than the students. And you do for about two or three years and the curve falls off sharply. And most of the older teachers I know, except for a very few geniuses, are extremely bored with teaching, and are not very interested in their students. And they’re going through the motions and their students are going through the motions. There is a weird schizophrenia about higher education.

David Foster Wallace

30 Jan 2009

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the samething to happen now. So they’ve arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Richard Feynman, Caltech Commencement Address, 1974

28 Jan 2009

I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.

Richard Dawkins (via tmblg)

For being so intelligent, Dawkins does a fine job of sounding like a fool. I’ve no inherent love for institutionalized religions, but this sort of woeful, sweeping generalization smacks of the very same blind dogmatism that legitimate rationalism seeks to dispel.

History furnishes us with many examples of deep faith or religiousness coinciding with the most thoughtful and inquisitive of minds. Consider Pascal, Faraday, and the very progenitor of inductive scientific inquiry himself, Francis Bacon, who wrote: ”a little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism; but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.”

Belief in a higher power is in no way exclusive of the pursuit of knowledge. And any viewpoint which refuses to admit of nuance will inherently fail to appreciate it.

28 Jan 2009

Barbour Rustic Driving Jacket via A Continuous Lean

25 Jan 2009