http://bactra.org/notebooks Cosma's Notebooks en http://bactra.org/notebooks/science-fiction.html (29 Jun 2008 12:40) I pledge allegiance to the form of science fiction and fantasy and to the promise for which it stands: one world, polycultural, genetically engineered, with Internet access for all... http://bactra.org/notebooks/fantasy.html (29 Jun 2008 12:25) Horror is recognized as a separate genre, but I don't read enough of it to make a separate notebook for it worthwhile... http://bactra.org/notebooks/democracy.html (28 Jun 2008 15:29) And science... http://bactra.org/notebooks/graphical-models.html (28 Jun 2008 15:28) A... http://bactra.org/notebooks/institutions.html (26 Jun 2008 13:51) Institutions keep society from falling apart, provided that there is something to keep institutions from falling apart... http://bactra.org/notebooks/social-networks.html (26 Jun 2008 13:51) See also: Complex Networks; Institutions and Organizations; Networks of Political Actors; Sociology; Sociology of Science; Terrorism Recommended (very misc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/terrorism.html (26 Jun 2008 13:50) Links between the two... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bayesian-consistency.html (25 Jun 2008 14:27) "Bayesian consistency" is usually taken to mean showing that, under Bayesian updating, the posterior probability concentrates on the true model... http://bactra.org/notebooks/learning-theory.html (25 Jun 2008 14:18) I qualify it to distinguish this area from the broader field of machine learning, which includes much more with lower standards of proof, and from the theory of learning in organisms, which might be quite different... http://bactra.org/notebooks/infinite-stochastic-dyn-sys.html (25 Jun 2008 14:00) I am working on an idea where I need to show that, in the long run, a certain infinite-dimensional discrete-time stochastic dynamical system has a stable limiting distribution, and calculate certain properties of that distribution... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sufficient-statistics.html (22 Jun 2008 21:27) In statistical theory, a "statistic" is a well-behaved function of the data, which is what's actualy used in calculations or inferences, rather than the full data set... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evol-epistem.html (22 Jun 2008 16:00) Like evolutionary psychology, this is really split into two parts... http://bactra.org/notebooks/network-data-analysis.html (18 Jun 2008 14:36) That is, of data on the form of networks --- I don't (as such) care about packet flow or other aspects of computer networks... http://bactra.org/notebooks/statistics.html (18 Jun 2008 10:25) An application of probability, with intimate ties to machine learning, non-demonstrative inference and induction... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neuroscience.html (16 Jun 2008 13:25) Esp... http://bactra.org/notebooks/globalization.html (15 Jun 2008 13:52) Without globalization, I'd literally not exist, but I realize others may not find that a compelling argument in its favor... http://bactra.org/notebooks/model-selection.html (13 Jun 2008 15:26) (Reader, please make your own suitably awful pun about the different senses of "model selection" here, as a discouragement to those finding this page through prurient searching... http://bactra.org/notebooks/economics.html (07 Jun 2008 13:07) I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good... http://bactra.org/notebooks/properties-vs-principles-for-statistics.html (04 Jun 2008 13:43) Now that I'm teaching in a statistics department, I find myself even more apt than before to get into (good-natured... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mystery-recs.html (03 Jun 2008 18:33) Including true crime and spy stories, for lack of better places to put them... http://bactra.org/notebooks/totalitarianism.html (03 Jun 2008 18:32) See also: Counter-Enlightenment; Empires and Imperialism; the Left; the Right; Revolution; Romanticism; Socialism; the Soviet Union Recommended: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism [Except that, as writers like Popper, Sternhell, Mazower, etc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/america.html (27 May 2008 19:51) The furnace where the future is being forged... http://bactra.org/notebooks/congress.html (27 May 2008 19:50) I'm starting to do research on this, Heaven help me, as an exercise in network analysis... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sociology.html (27 May 2008 10:32) Somewhat unfairly, this notebook also serves as my dumping-ground for general issues related to all the social sciences, as well as "social theory" (so far as I can make out: sociology unburdened by any but the most stylized facts)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/intellectual-property.html (27 May 2008 10:30) "Informational property" might be a better term for something that embraces so much utterly unintellectual stuff... http://bactra.org/notebooks/knowledge-factor.html (27 May 2008 10:30) To read: Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance [Blurb] T... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evol-psych.html (26 May 2008 12:53) Someday we'll live on Venus And men will walk on Mars But we will still be monkeys Down deep inside The study of how our minds have evolved, and the traces left by that evolution... http://bactra.org/notebooks/classical-era-mediterranean.html (22 May 2008 00:01) I couldn't have been more than nine or ten when I started reading books about Greek mythology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ecology.html (18 May 2008 14:18) "Ecology" is not a religion or a political movement but merely a science, and an impeccably materialist and reductionist one at that... http://bactra.org/notebooks/filtering.html (15 May 2008 20:07) Filtering... http://bactra.org/notebooks/finance.html (13 May 2008 17:22) This is a place-holder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/spatial-statistics.html (13 May 2008 16:36) That is, statistics for random variables spread out in space, and possibly evolving in time --- the spatiotemporal case is the one which really interests me... http://bactra.org/notebooks/political-decision-making.html (11 May 2008 09:16) See also Congress; Democracy; Judgment; Networks of Political Actors; Social Engineering Recommended: Kenneth Arrow, Social Choice and Individual Values [Full text free online] David Braybrooke and Charles E... http://bactra.org/notebooks/renaissance.html (09 May 2008 14:01) See also: Early Modern Europe [a superset of the Renaissance]; Erasmus Recommended: Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past Alfred Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250--1600 S... http://bactra.org/notebooks/causality.html (09 May 2008 09:59) There is unfortunately no accepted name for the scientific study of causality, and of methods for inferring it... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evolution-of-complexity.html (08 May 2008 14:13) That is, how does biological evolution affect the complexity of organisms... http://bactra.org/notebooks/physical-biology.html (07 May 2008 08:04) The construction of the universe is certainly very much easier to explain than is that of a plant ... http://bactra.org/notebooks/learning-inference-induction.html (06 May 2008 09:40) There's a place where AI, statistics and epistemology-methodology converge, or want to anyhow... http://bactra.org/notebooks/turbulence.html (05 May 2008 09:57) The story is told of many giants of modern physics, but most plausibly of Heisenberg, that, on his death-bed, he remarked that the two great unsolved problems were reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity, and turbulence... http://bactra.org/notebooks/linguistic-evolution-models.html (02 May 2008 11:05) This notebook is for collecting references on computational, especially agent-based, models of the evolution of language... http://bactra.org/notebooks/entropy-estimation.html (02 May 2008 10:39) The central mathematical objects in information theory are the entropies of random variables... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evolution.html (01 May 2008 09:18) [A proper discussion of evolution will appear here Any Time Now... http://bactra.org/notebooks/scientific-method.html (01 May 2008 09:15) Philosophy of science these days seems largely concerned with questions of method, justification and reliability --- what do scientists do (and are they all doing the same thing... http://bactra.org/notebooks/computation.html (01 May 2008 08:40) Computers aren't made of matter... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pattern-formation.html (29 Apr 2008 13:17) Spiral leads me to sleep I should probably spin off reaction-diffusion models as a separate notebook... http://bactra.org/notebooks/time-series.html (29 Apr 2008 13:15) Rates of convergence of estimators; confidence intervals, analogs to VC-dimension results (see Meir's paper below)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/linguistics.html (29 Apr 2008 13:02) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/afghanistan.html (29 Apr 2008 12:47) Everything mentioned under Central Asia, only even more so; Nuristan or Kaffiristan, and its similiarities to Andean cultures; religious history; the city of Ghazni, Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, the Ghaznavid dynstay; Balkh; the "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/biochem-network-evol.html (26 Apr 2008 17:08) Including: gene regulatory networks, protein interaction networks, signal transduction, and metabolism... http://bactra.org/notebooks/signal-transduction.html (26 Apr 2008 17:08) Things happen to cells: they run into various chemicals, they get heated and cooled, they get hit by photons of various frequencies, they get stretched and sheared and electrified... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sociology-of-science.html (23 Apr 2008 21:19) Raymond Aron says somewhere that "science is inseparable from the republic of scholars... http://bactra.org/notebooks/complexity-measures.html (20 Apr 2008 15:57) C'est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas de la science... http://bactra.org/notebooks/complexity.html (20 Apr 2008 15:51) A definition would be nice... http://bactra.org/notebooks/decison-theory.html (11 Apr 2008 23:08) By which I mean the various mathematical theories of optimal decison-making; a division of both statistics and economics... http://bactra.org/notebooks/reductionism.html (11 Apr 2008 10:33) Reductionism, roughly speaking, is the view that everything in this world is really something else, and that the something else is always in the end unedifying... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neuro-synch.html (09 Apr 2008 17:35) See also: Synchronization; Neural Coding; Neuroscience Recommended: Andreas K... http://bactra.org/notebooks/teaching-statistics.html (09 Apr 2008 17:08) Doing this is now, officially, what I am paid for... http://bactra.org/notebooks/programming.html (09 Apr 2008 17:03) I've been programming since I was about ten --- that was on a delapidated TRS-80 Model I, with 16k RAM, which someone had donated to my school... http://bactra.org/notebooks/collective-cognition.html (07 Apr 2008 12:48) Rather than repeating myself about what I mean by "collective cognition," I refer you to my review of Ed Hutchins's Cognition in the Wild, and the introduction to the 2002 SFI Workshop on Collective Cognition I co-organized (that introduction is primarily based on an essay I wrote as a distraction from finishing my dissertation)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/power-laws.html (04 Apr 2008 16:00) Why do physicists care about power laws so much... http://bactra.org/notebooks/community-discovery.html (04 Apr 2008 15:59) Given: a network, especially a large one, directed or not, weighted or not... http://bactra.org/notebooks/chaos.html (28 Mar 2008 11:39) And the future is certain Give us time to work it out Take your favorite mathematical space... http://bactra.org/notebooks/math.html (21 Mar 2008 15:50) Some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way... http://bactra.org/notebooks/foreign-policy.html (19 Mar 2008 15:50) See also: the Cold War; Empires and Imperialism; Globalization; Terrorism; War Recommended (very, very, very misc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/central-asia.html (14 Mar 2008 07:41) Contacts with Europeans in ancient times; the Greco-Bactrians; Bronze Age and earlier cities, their culture and commerce; the Silk Road; nomadism, relations of current nomads to those of Herodotus, cycles of nomadic invasion (one of my pet theories is that Lenin was the last great Central Asian conqueror); "lost cities of desert Cathay"; Paul or Pavel Nazaroff; Sir Aurel Stein; current politics, especially in Kyrgyz Republic; cultural history; cultural exports; shamanism; pagan survivals under Islam... http://bactra.org/notebooks/fantasy-recs.html (10 Mar 2008 09:33) These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books; but rather than trying to rate each one, or (what would be more to the point) explain my ratings, I've merely listed them without any particular indication of rank... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stoch-diff-eqs.html (10 Mar 2008 09:31) Non-stochastic differential equations are models of dynamical systems where the state evolves continuously in time... http://bactra.org/notebooks/excitable-media.html (29 Feb 2008 15:05) Mathematical aspects, especially topology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stat-mech-foundations.html (28 Feb 2008 21:11) Technical issues: things like, what exactly is a C* algebra... http://bactra.org/notebooks/soc.html (28 Feb 2008 10:38) One of many, many ways of generating power law distributions; not "how nature works"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/memes.html (28 Feb 2008 10:18) Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man... http://bactra.org/notebooks/social-science-methodology.html (23 Feb 2008 12:53) That is: what are the appropriate methods for studying social or cultural phenomena in a scientific way... http://bactra.org/notebooks/judgment.html (23 Feb 2008 12:44) See also: Artificial Intelligence; Artificial Intelligence and Natural Folly; Cognitive Science; Clinical versus Actuarial Judgment; Evolutionary Psychology; Institutions and Organizations; Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Induction; Management; Neuropsychology; Political Decision-Making; Statistics Recommended: Colin Camerer, "Individual Decision Making", in Kagel and Roth Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, "Are Humans Good Intuitive Statisticians After All... http://bactra.org/notebooks/physics-computation-information.html (22 Feb 2008 18:22) First: what does physics say about computation and communication... http://bactra.org/notebooks/complex-networks.html (22 Feb 2008 18:21) Having written a whole pop-sci article about these things (see below), I won't explain them at all here... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neuropsychology.html (17 Feb 2008 10:22) The attempt to understand mental functions by correlating them with the activities of particular parts of the brain... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cognitive-science.html (16 Feb 2008 23:44) Not to be confused with any of the following, unless it is in the end identical to one or more of them: Analogy and Metaphor; Artificial Intelligence; Noam Chomsky; Collective Cognition; Emotion; Evolutionary Psychology; Linguistics Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Induction; Neural Nets and Connectionism; Neuropsychology; Neuroscience; Philosophy of Mind; "Pre-Cognitivism"; Herbert Simon; Social Neuroscience; Thought and Society; L... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mdl.html (16 Feb 2008 23:10) MDL is an information-theoretic approach to machine learning, or statistical model selection, which basically says you should pick the model which gives you the most compact description of the data, including the description of the model itself... http://bactra.org/notebooks/universal-prediction.html (16 Feb 2008 23:09) Given: a single time series, perhaps a very long one, from a stochastic process which is basically unknown; perhaps merely that it is stationary and ergodic... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sequential-decisions.html (16 Feb 2008 23:07) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cities.html (15 Feb 2008 21:41) Are there any instances of cities which are not parts of states (perhaps just limited to that city and its immediate environs)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/wiener.html (15 Feb 2008 16:23) A very carefully brought up young man... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neutral-cultural-networks.html (15 Feb 2008 11:48) It is a common-place observation that there are strong relationships between cultural traits and social attributes; that different social groups accept and transmit different bits of culture... http://bactra.org/notebooks/human-evolution.html (03 Feb 2008 17:36) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder, for yet another subject I find interesting but don't really understand... http://bactra.org/notebooks/social-neuroscience.html (02 Feb 2008 09:24) I... http://bactra.org/notebooks/noneq-sm.html (25 Jan 2008 21:37) In equilibrium, we can use functions of states --- free energies, thermodynamic potentials --- to determine the most probable state... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ethics-biology.html (23 Jan 2008 12:32) One of the ideas I'm very fond of is that virtue isn't its own reward, it's a dominating strategy... http://bactra.org/notebooks/data-mining.html (07 Jan 2008 21:35) I've taught a course on this, so I ought to be able to describe it, oughtn't I... http://bactra.org/notebooks/self-organization.html (07 Jan 2008 21:33) Something is self-organizing if, left to itself, it tends to become more organized... http://bactra.org/notebooks/emergent-properties.html (07 Jan 2008 18:47) In complexity theory... http://bactra.org/notebooks/thought-and-society.html (07 Jan 2008 18:30) Not thinking about society, but how society and culture shape thought... http://bactra.org/notebooks/law.html (06 Jan 2008 11:47) Like I have any qualifications to say anything about this... http://bactra.org/notebooks/emotion.html (01 Jan 2008 13:11) Yes, only an overly-intellectual geek keeps a notebook of academic references on emotion; but I'm happy as an overly-intellectual geek... http://bactra.org/notebooks/antarctica.html (30 Dec 2007 18:07) An odd enthusiasm, perhaps, but my own; since it's part of my armchair-travel complex, it's not been sensibly diminished by winters in Wisconsin and Michigan... http://bactra.org/notebooks/probability.html (30 Dec 2007 17:46) One of my advisers in graduate school was a probability theorist, as was his adviser before him; I've not bothered to check, but I wouldn't be astonished if the chain went back to someone like Bernoulli... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stochastic-processes.html (30 Dec 2007 17:43) Things to understand better: Large deviations... http://bactra.org/notebooks/interacting-particle-systems.html (30 Dec 2007 17:42) In the obvious sense, all of statistical mechanics is about "interacting particle systems"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/kolakowski.html (29 Dec 2007 18:53) Polish philosopher and historian of philosophy... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pomo.html (29 Dec 2007 18:53) I'm not going to try to explain these fashions here... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sf-recs.html (29 Dec 2007 18:47) These range from merely good reads to really outstanding books... http://bactra.org/notebooks/networks-of-political-actors.html (29 Dec 2007 17:36) One of the things I'm interested in is understanding how network forms of organization emerge among political actors, how they affect decision-making, and how they interact with other social networks and institutions... http://bactra.org/notebooks/maya.html (28 Dec 2007 10:53) Its accomplishments... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mysteries.html (21 Dec 2007 15:23) I've spun off the list of recommendations into a separate page... http://bactra.org/notebooks/romanticists.html (21 Dec 2007 14:33) Political, religious and moral views... http://bactra.org/notebooks/guerillas.html (21 Dec 2007 13:01) There is a strong overlap with peasant revolts, but urban guerilla warfare is certainly possible, and increasingly common... http://bactra.org/notebooks/empires.html (15 Dec 2007 10:47) Benefits to the conquerors, if any... http://bactra.org/notebooks/quantum-mechanics.html (14 Dec 2007 23:02) I am not going to try to explain quantum mechanics here... http://bactra.org/notebooks/early-modern-europe.html (14 Dec 2007 18:12) See also: Alchemy; Demonology; Erasmus; Millenarianism; the Renaissance (a sub-set of this period); the Scientific Revolution; the Witch-Craze Recommended (naturally, very misc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/world-history.html (14 Dec 2007 18:12) Where "macrohistory" begins and ordinary history leaves off, I shan't attempt to say... http://bactra.org/notebooks/feminism.html (14 Dec 2007 18:12) Hume once said that the doctrine of the real presence of the flesh and blood of Christ in the eucharist was, ``so absurd, it eludes the force of all argument''; and I feel much the same way about those who oppose feminism... http://bactra.org/notebooks/education-academia.html (01 Dec 2007 13:41) I'm quite aware that the two are by no means synonymous... http://bactra.org/notebooks/random-time-changes.html (27 Nov 2007 20:11) There are a class of results about transforming one stochastic process into another by stretching and shrinking the time-scale, sometimes in a deterministic manner, more often by means of a random change of time-scale which depends on the realized trajectory of the process you started with... http://bactra.org/notebooks/agent-based-modeling.html (24 Nov 2007 19:51) Fundamentally, I'm not sure that agent-based modeling amounts to anything other than object-oriented programming for disaggregated simulations --- which is a very useful thing, of course... http://bactra.org/notebooks/recurrence-times.html (24 Nov 2007 00:21) The recurrence time of a state or a finite trajectory is simply how long one must wait to revisit the state, or re-traverse that trajectory... http://bactra.org/notebooks/climate-change.html (24 Nov 2007 00:18) Need I add that this is an inadequate placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/minority-game.html (24 Nov 2007 00:12) This is a placeholder, accumulating references for a project I'm pondering... http://bactra.org/notebooks/china-today.html (20 Nov 2007 15:23) Dissidence (esp... http://bactra.org/notebooks/space.html (14 Nov 2007 21:47) Someday we'll walk on Venus Someday we'll walk on Mars Recommended (obviously, a tiny selection): Milan M... http://bactra.org/notebooks/left.html (10 Nov 2007 11:11) The right-thinking people who move us forward... http://bactra.org/notebooks/socialism.html (10 Nov 2007 11:10) Political control of economic life is not the consummation of world history, the fulfilment of destiny, or the imposition of righteousness; it is a painful necessity... http://bactra.org/notebooks/seriatim.html (04 Nov 2007 10:18) I got interested in this subject because of William Calvin's "projectile theory of consciousness" or "throwing theory of thought"; his reasoning is something like this... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pragmatism.html (31 Oct 2007 20:34) If we strain out the differences, personal and philosophical, they [the pragmatists] had with one another, we can say what [they] had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea --- an idea about ideas... http://bactra.org/notebooks/diversity.html (29 Oct 2007 16:53) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nationalism.html (29 Oct 2007 16:53) Origins... http://bactra.org/notebooks/millenarian.html (29 Oct 2007 12:46) Still waiting The name is from the 20th chapter of the Book of Revelations... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evol-econ.html (29 Oct 2007 12:37) See also Learning in Games; Memes; QWERTY... http://bactra.org/notebooks/management.html (29 Oct 2007 12:28) Claimed to avert a catastrophe... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ergodic-theory.html (29 Oct 2007 09:40) A measure on a mathematical space is a way of assigning weights to different parts of the space; volume is a measure on ordinary three-dimensional Euclidean space... http://bactra.org/notebooks/branching-processes.html (26 Oct 2007 16:26) A class of stochastic process important as models in genetics and population biology, chemical kinetics, and filtering... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neural-coding.html (25 Oct 2007 13:38) And the statistics of neural spike trains more generally... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evolving-local-rules.html (09 Oct 2007 00:10) Some computational problems are very natural and easy in a centralized framework... http://bactra.org/notebooks/right.html (07 Oct 2007 21:09) Some people like to read about plagues, parasites, or psychopaths... http://bactra.org/notebooks/novel-recs.html (05 Oct 2007 08:54) I have separate recommendations pages for fantasy, mysteries and science fiction... http://bactra.org/notebooks/inference-markov.html (28 Sep 2007 21:44) I am concerned here with inferring the parameters and/or the structure of the model, not with the estimation of the hidden state (in th HMM case); that problem falls under filtering... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cellular-automata.html (28 Sep 2007 21:41) The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neural-nets.html (27 Sep 2007 13:59) I'm mostly interested in them as a means of machine learning or statistical inference... http://bactra.org/notebooks/myths.html (26 Sep 2007 09:55) As stories... http://bactra.org/notebooks/markov.html (25 Sep 2007 19:47) Markov processes are my life... http://bactra.org/notebooks/new-mexico.html (25 Sep 2007 18:59) Especially northern New Mexico, especially Santa Fe and environs... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ai.html (25 Sep 2007 18:48) Note: I quite realize this notebook is grossly inadequate to its subject... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ussr.html (25 Sep 2007 18:30) At some point here I need to write out my (non-serious) ideas about how the Leninists were like the Chinggisids and the Timurids, and similar Eurasian powers: explosive rise to dominance over a wide area of conquest, remarkable horrors, widespread emulation abroad, patronage of sciences and arts, profound cultural transformations and importations, collapse and fragmentation leaving many successor states struggling to sustain the same style... http://bactra.org/notebooks/parallel.html (25 Sep 2007 18:26) Cellular automata are parallel, interacting finite state machines; some of them are Turing-equivalent, that is, can compute any computable function... http://bactra.org/notebooks/structuralism.html (25 Sep 2007 18:09) Intellectual trend of the middle of the twentieth century, originating in linguistics, influential in the humanities and some parts of the social sciences... http://bactra.org/notebooks/grammatical-inference.html (25 Sep 2007 14:54) Meaing: inferring the rules of a formal language (its grammar) from examples, positive or negative... http://bactra.org/notebooks/alife.html (25 Sep 2007 12:45) Patterns form and fall apart... http://bactra.org/notebooks/monte-carlo.html (24 Sep 2007 10:46) Monte Carlo is an estimation procedure... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neural-modeling.html (24 Sep 2007 10:27) Especially, but not exclusively, modeling of spike trains (which is important for neural coding, and overlaps therewith)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/gene-expression-data.html (24 Sep 2007 10:12) I won't try to explain what gene expression is or why it's important here (see Signal Transduction, Gene Expression, and Control of Metabolism instead)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/peasant-revolts.html (23 Sep 2007 12:31) These have been (and still are... http://bactra.org/notebooks/literacy.html (23 Sep 2007 12:25) Recommended: Carlo M... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ibn-khaldun.html (20 Sep 2007 10:44) Having tried my hand at explaining the core of ibn Khaldûn's theory of history already, I will basically repeat myself for the next three paragraphs... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stochastic-approximation.html (18 Sep 2007 15:20) Logically, "stochastic approximation" could refer to a great range of things, but in practice it has become something of a technical term for procedures that approximate the solution of an equation, observed through noise, or which try to minimize a function, again observed through noise... http://bactra.org/notebooks/simon.html (17 Sep 2007 14:10) American polymath, sadly deceased after an extremely long and productive career... http://bactra.org/notebooks/learning-games.html (13 Sep 2007 15:55) See also Collective Cognition; Evolutionary Economics; Machine Learning, Statistical Inference and Induction; the Minority Game; Sequential Decisions Under Uncertainty Recommended: Jenna Bednar and Scott Page, "Games Theory and Culture" [PDF] Dean P... http://bactra.org/notebooks/info-geo.html (08 Sep 2007 13:26) This a slightly misleading name for applying differential geometry to families of probability distributions, and so to statistical models... http://bactra.org/notebooks/predation-of-humans.html (03 Sep 2007 13:16) Being eaten by other animals appears to have been a major risk for humans (and other hominids) over most of our evolutionary history... http://bactra.org/notebooks/capek.html (03 Sep 2007 13:12) Čapek (the C should have a convex-down bow above it, and the name is pronounced, I am told, something like "Chop-ek") was a Czech writer and man of letters... http://bactra.org/notebooks/topology-and-synchronization.html (01 Sep 2007 16:04) Are certain kinds of networks always easier to synchronize... http://bactra.org/notebooks/max-ent.html (29 Aug 2007 12:49) It's heresy, but I really don't believe in the maximum entropy principle... http://bactra.org/notebooks/rhetoric.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Animals communicate to manipulate the behavior, present or future, of other animals... http://bactra.org/notebooks/technology-and-society.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Technology as a cause of social change... http://bactra.org/notebooks/titan.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) The largest moon of Saturn... http://bactra.org/notebooks/vc-dim-of-evca.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) In the Evolving Cellular Automata Project (and related work elsewhere, but it never hurts to plug places you used to work), one-dimensional CA rules of fixed radius were evaluated on their ability to correctly classify the density of their initial strings --- i... http://bactra.org/notebooks/richards-i-a.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) British literary critic, theorist of literature and education, and (so to speak) "pre-cognitivist", someone who would have embraced cognitive science had it only been around at the time... http://bactra.org/notebooks/welfare-state.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Recommended: Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, "Is Equality Passe... http://bactra.org/notebooks/state-space-reconstruction.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) An aspect of time series analysis: given that the time series came from a dynamical system, figure out the state space of that system from observation alone... http://bactra.org/notebooks/wm-james.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Recommended: Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James... http://bactra.org/notebooks/university-industrial-complex.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Evolution... http://bactra.org/notebooks/state-formation.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) States are very old: the earliest writing finds them well-established in Sumer and in Egypt... http://bactra.org/notebooks/synchronization.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Synchronization in the brain probably deserves its own notebook... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sung.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) With glances towards the T'ang and the Yuan Recommended: Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past William H... http://bactra.org/notebooks/psychotherapy.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) See also: Freud; Jung; Neuropsychiatry; Persuasion; Possession; Religious Conversion Recommended: Nancy Andreasen, The Broken Brain Robyn M... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pre-columbian.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) I guess I should specify: in the Americas... http://bactra.org/notebooks/phase-transitions.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) One of the central areas of statistical mechanics for the last, oh, forty years, to the point where it has seriously shaped --- one might even say, warpped --- how those of us trained in that tradition look at the world in general... http://bactra.org/notebooks/imagination.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Varieties (James, following Galton, classified them by the sense simulated --- visual, verbal, kinetic, etc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ergodic-markov.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder of references... http://bactra.org/notebooks/campaign-finance.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) See also: Congress Recommended: Frank J... http://bactra.org/notebooks/arch-design.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Traditional Islamic... http://bactra.org/notebooks/borges.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Argentine writer of sheer, unalloyed genius... http://bactra.org/notebooks/china-20th-century.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) The post-Mao period is peculiar enough --- and interesting enough to me --- to rate its own notebook... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nk-networks.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) See also: Adaptation; Artificial Life; Biological Order and Levels of Organization; Cellular Automata; Chaos and Non-linear Dynamics; Dissipative Structures; Edge of Chaos; Physical Principles in Biology; Self-organization; Statistical Mechanics Recommended (essential): Stuart Kauffman, The Origins of Order [Highly interesting, but to be read with some caution... http://bactra.org/notebooks/prigogine.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Ilya Prigogine was a Belgian-American scientist, working mainly in physical chemistry and statistical mechanics... http://bactra.org/notebooks/enlightenment.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, La Mettrie, Smith, Gibbon... http://bactra.org/notebooks/human-ecology.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) I use the phrase with some diffidence, because I'm not quite sure this is what other people mean by it... http://bactra.org/notebooks/micro-macro.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) [A placeholder while I organize my thoughts] Statistical mechanics (especially, perhaps, non-equilibrium statistical mechanics), cellular automata (especially their continuum limits), evolutionary theory, economics, sociology, simulation modeling, large deviations of stochastic processes, emergence, Recommended: David Cai, Louis Tao and David W... http://bactra.org/notebooks/historical-materialism.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) An appalling name for an important idea... http://bactra.org/notebooks/basis-selection-in-function-decomposition.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Fourier analysis, as every schoolchild knows, is a way of taking arbitrary functions of time (or space; but let's stick to time) and re-writing them as sums of trigonometric functions... http://bactra.org/notebooks/chinese-history.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Recommended: Derek Bodde, Chinese Thought, Society and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-Modern China [I can't figure out what a lot of these essays have to do with science or technology, but they make for a fascinating ramble around many aspects of pre-modern Chinese culture and society... http://bactra.org/notebooks/info-in-games.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) The sense in which "information" is used in decision-theory and game-theory, and so in economics, seems to be quite different than the way it's used in information theory as such... http://bactra.org/notebooks/edge-of-chaos.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) The notion is that "complex systems" (sometimes just "complex adaptive systems," both Names Which Must Be Destroyed) tend, in some ill-defined sense, to be poised on the border between order (no change or periodic change) and chaos (aperiodic change), because this is somehow the most flexible and evolvable position; that things "evolve to evolve" to the edge of chaos... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cold-war.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Yet another inadequate placeholder Aspects of particular interest: how it shaped domestic developments in America; the cultural struggle aspect... http://bactra.org/notebooks/godels-theorem.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) A much-abused result in mathematical logic, supposed by many authors who don't understand it to support their own favored brand of rubbish, and even subjected to surprisingly rough handling by some who really should know better... http://bactra.org/notebooks/positivism.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) My positivism is largely temperamental: that is, I am incapable of lending credence to someone like Hegel or St... http://bactra.org/notebooks/didion.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Recommended: Nonfiction: Slouching Towards Bethlehem The White Album Salvador [See also In El Salvador and In El Salvador: Soluciones] After Henry Political Fictions Novels: A Book of Common Prayer Democracy The Last Thing He Wanted Play It As It Lays To read: Fixed Opinions Miami Run River The Year of Magical Thinking [The excerpts from this which ran in The Guardian were very moving] http://bactra.org/notebooks/diversity-in-ml.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) To read: Shane Legg and Marcus Hutter, "Fitness Uniform Deletion: A Simple Way to Preserve Diversity", cs... http://bactra.org/notebooks/political-elites.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Are they inevitable... http://bactra.org/notebooks/multi-agent-systems.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Cf... http://bactra.org/notebooks/phylogeny-in-evca.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Once upon a time, I was a minor contributor to the Evolving Cellular Automata project at the Santa Fe Institute... http://bactra.org/notebooks/dying-earth.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) A sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy, set in the far future: decadent, inward-looking, dreaming cities, largely forgotten technology-indistinguishable-from-magic (or maybe it is magic), the sun growing dim, red, splotchy, etc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bertrand-russell.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) I first read Russell when I was nine: my parents had copies of his books in the old Simon and Schuster editions, with the attractive abstract covers, which were left on a low shelf near the science fiction... http://bactra.org/notebooks/collective-action.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Yes, Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/history-of-science.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) See also: the Scientific Revolution; Sociology of Science Recommended: Margaret Alic, Hypatia's Heritage J... http://bactra.org/notebooks/corporations.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Corporations are a particular kind of institution, which for obscure reasons have come to dominate the economies of industrial societies... http://bactra.org/notebooks/kernel-classifiers-for-time-series.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Yet Another Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/astrophysics.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) A personal hatred: the anthropic principle... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mesopotamia.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Recommended: Guillermo Algaze, "The Sumerian Takeoff", Structure and Dynamics 1:1 (2005): 2 [From the abstract: "Economic geographers correctly note that regional variations in economic activity and population agglomeration are always the result of self-reinforcing processes of resource production, accumulation, exchange, and innovation... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ensemble-ml.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Boosting, bagging, binning, stacking, mixtures of experts, ... http://bactra.org/notebooks/goddess.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) An invention of 19th and 20th century occultism and speculations about prehistory (as opposed to particular goddesses, of whom there are and have been plenty)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nietzsche.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) I read Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a freshman; it's striking how much Uncle Fritz improved in only a few short years... http://bactra.org/notebooks/al-andalus.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Romanticization in later periods, by both Muslims and westerners... http://bactra.org/notebooks/lit-crit.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) There are a great many books to read; there are many place to travel to... http://bactra.org/notebooks/development-econ.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) By a "developed" economy, people roughly mean ones with a high, persistently-growing per-captia income which is not simply based on resource extraction (i... http://bactra.org/notebooks/biofilms.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder... http://bactra.org/notebooks/partial-identification.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) A parametric statistical model is said to be "identifiable" if no two parameter settings give rise to the same distribution of observations... http://bactra.org/notebooks/persuasion.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Really, non-rational techniques of persuasion... http://bactra.org/notebooks/poetry.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Mostly a confession of ones I've not read: To read: Bella Akhmadulina (Tartar-Italian Russian poet) Anna Akhmatova Baudelaire, Fleurs de mal Joan Bennett, Four Metaphysical Poets Alice Fulton Louise Glück Robert Hass Jane Kenyon John Crowe Ransom, Poems and Essays Santayana, Three Metaphysical Poets James Thomson, City of Dreadful Night Derek Wallcott, Omeros Yevgeny Yevtushenko http://bactra.org/notebooks/chinese-philosophy-warring-states.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) Taoist, Confucian, ``Naturalist'', ``School of Names''... http://bactra.org/notebooks/erasmus.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) If this wasn't Yet Another Inadequate Placeholder, I would say something about the pivotal role of Erasmus in many of the developments that shaped the modern world: the Renaissance "revival" (really, transmutation) of classical learning in northern and western Europe; the Reformation; the beginnings of ideals of toleration; independent intellectuals reaching an audience through mass media such as printed books; and advanced textual scholarship... http://bactra.org/notebooks/particle-based-computation.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) That is, constructing computational processes out of the interactions of spatially-localized, temporally-persisting, mobile blobs of activity or stuff, in whatever sense of "stuff" or "activity" may be appropriate... http://bactra.org/notebooks/lucretius.html (20 Aug 2007 21:31) I read about half of De Rerum Natura when I was younger and my Latin was better; when I am older and my Latin is better I should like to translate the whole thing... http://bactra.org/notebooks/tsallis.html (29 Jan 2007 23:22) A standard assumption of statistical mechanics is that quantities like energy are "extensive" variables, meaning that the total energy of the system is proportional to the system size; similarly the entropy is also supposed to be extensive... http://bactra.org/notebooks/symbolic-dynamics.html (13 Nov 2005 14:07) A useful method for studying discrete-time dynamical systems with continuous state spaces... http://bactra.org/notebooks/large-deviations.html (09 Nov 2005 17:39) The limit theorems of probability theory --- the weak and strong laws of large numbers, the central limit theorem, etc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/information-theory.html (09 Nov 2005 15:33) Imagine that someone hands you a sealed envelope, containing, say, a telegram... http://bactra.org/notebooks/dynamics-cognition.html (17 Dec 2004 09:10) Since the early 1990s, some people have gotten very excited about the idea that dynamical systems theory can be used to model cognitive processes... http://bactra.org/notebooks/yet-another-information-matrix.html (02 Dec 2004 14:18) Suppose I have a stochastic process, whose measure is (let's be imaginative) ... http://bactra.org/notebooks/counter-enlightenment.html (03 Oct 2004 12:17) See also: Artistic Modernism; Decadence; the Enlightenment; Modernity; Postmodernism; the Right; Romanticism; Totalitarianism Recommended: Isaiah Berlin, "The Counter-Enlightenment" [An essay reprinted in several of his collections; one version is online as part of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas] Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies [A good essay, and nice at showing how common counter-Enlightenment themes are and have been... http://bactra.org/notebooks/islamists.html (22 Sep 2004 11:14) This is a tremendously important subject, and I won't even pretend to adequate coverage... http://bactra.org/notebooks/iran.html (20 Sep 2004 11:26) By which I mean the modern country, especially since the beginning of the 20th century, and not the whole previous history of Persianate culture... http://bactra.org/notebooks/decadence.html (14 Sep 2004 10:46) A lot of European high culture in the early 20th century can be better understood once you realize that many people had a sense that the West was somehow succumbing to decadence, and needed to be regenerated... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mathematical-logic.html (08 Sep 2004 11:07) If, in 1901, a talented and sympathetic outsider had been called upon (say, by a granting-giving agency) to survey the sciences and name the branch which would be least fruitful in century ahead, his choice might well have settled upon mathematical logic, an exceedingly recondite field whose practitioners could all have fit into a small auditorium --- algebraists consumed by abstractive passion, or philosophers pursuing fantasies out of Leibniz and Ramon Llull, or (like Whitehead) both... http://bactra.org/notebooks/foundations.html (26 Aug 2004 12:22) This is a place-holder; it needs a better name, which I hope will come from thinking things through... http://bactra.org/notebooks/symbolic-correlations.html (23 Aug 2004 16:10) The Chinese had a very elaborate system of these, as did Euro-Islamic astrology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/dennett.html (22 Aug 2004 12:30) There's a party in my mind And the party never stops Party up there all the time Gonna party till they drop One of my favorite writers, whose books have changed my mind about things like what a self really is and whether or not there's free will... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ibn-rushd.html (01 Aug 2004 11:55) Andalusian philosopher, most interesting to me for his work on causality... http://bactra.org/notebooks/market-knowledge-duality.html (01 Aug 2004 11:55) This is a seriously underbaked thought, inspired by listening to Ed Durfee talk about his work on coordinating plans in multi-agent systems... http://bactra.org/notebooks/clinical-vs-actuarial.html (12 Apr 2004 09:55) For something like fifty years now, psychologists have been studying the question of "clinical versus actuarial judgment"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pre-cognitivism.html (28 Mar 2004 15:54) This is not an altogether well-defined category in my mind... http://bactra.org/notebooks/vygotsky.html (28 Mar 2004 15:36) Soviet psychologist and prominent "pre-cognitivist"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/faq.html (06 Mar 2004 14:20) I... http://bactra.org/notebooks/semiotics.html (04 Mar 2004 11:33) The self-described science of signs, and of their use... http://bactra.org/notebooks/military-industrial.html (03 Mar 2004 17:05) Their economic importance: in N... http://bactra.org/notebooks/transducers.html (03 Mar 2004 16:20) The basic idea of a transducer is that it turns one sort of quantity, its inputs, into another, its outputs... http://bactra.org/notebooks/control.html (03 Mar 2004 16:13) See also: Cybernetics; Filtering, State Estimation and Signal Processing; Multi-agent Systems; Neural Control of Action; Signal Transduction, Gene Expression and Control of Metabolism; Time Series Transducers Recommended: H... http://bactra.org/notebooks/hu-shih.html (02 Mar 2004 19:40) 19th and 20th century Chinese philosopher and historian of philosophy, active in the May 4th movement and the early 20th century Chinese literary renaissance; a disciple of John Dewey who tried to adapt American pragmatism to Chinese circumstances... http://bactra.org/notebooks/arthur-waley.html (02 Mar 2004 19:26) British poet and scholar, best known, and rightly so, for his translations from the Chinese... http://bactra.org/notebooks/su-tung-po.html (02 Mar 2004 19:13) Sung dynasty poet; real name, Su Shih... http://bactra.org/notebooks/l-susan-stebbing.html (02 Mar 2004 19:01) British analytical philosopher; sadly now little-known... http://bactra.org/notebooks/logical-positivism.html (02 Mar 2004 18:59) There's a word for it And words don't mean a thing There's name for it And names make all the difference in the world Some things can never be spoken Some things cannot be pronounced That word does not exist in any language It will never be uttered by a human mouth... http://bactra.org/notebooks/spinoza.html (02 Mar 2004 18:26) Dutch/Sephardic philosopher and lens-maker... http://bactra.org/notebooks/omar-khayyam.html (02 Mar 2004 17:39) Medieval Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet... http://bactra.org/notebooks/piaget.html (02 Mar 2004 17:35) Swiss psychologist, most famous for his studies of the development of thought in children... http://bactra.org/notebooks/li-po-tu-fu.html (02 Mar 2004 17:26) Chinese poets of the T'ang dynasty; famously, friends, hence their joint entry here... http://bactra.org/notebooks/chuang-tzu.html (02 Mar 2004 17:19) Supposedly, a Taoist philosopher of the Warring States period in China... http://bactra.org/notebooks/poincare.html (02 Mar 2004 17:07) French mathematician, physicist and methodologist... http://bactra.org/notebooks/1001-nights.html (02 Mar 2004 16:48) How did the collection develop... http://bactra.org/notebooks/gore-vidal.html (02 Mar 2004 16:42) American essayist and novelist, with a few (failed) ventures into politics... http://bactra.org/notebooks/asceticism.html (02 Mar 2004 15:16) Especially intellectual self-mortification... http://bactra.org/notebooks/frankfurt-school.html (24 Feb 2004 21:26) Mid-twentieth century school of social philosophy and cultural criticism, originally centered around the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (hence the name)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/field-theory.html (14 Feb 2004 10:55) Recommended, non-technical: Richard Feynman, QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter [Introduces field theory so gently he never even calls it that... http://bactra.org/notebooks/vance.html (21 Jan 2004 08:24) American author of science fiction, fantasy and mysteries (the last as either John Holbrook Vance or various pseudonyms)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/development-bio.html (20 Jan 2004 08:50) The science formerly known as embryology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/scientific-revolution.html (20 Jan 2004 08:46) Something which happened (largely) in western Europe between (for the most part) 1500 and 1700... http://bactra.org/notebooks/environmentalism.html (18 Jan 2004 12:05) Polluting ourselves out of house and home is a Bad Thing, and certainly an ugly one; ditto indiscriminate destruction of wild-life and environments... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cep-gzip.html (02 Dec 2003 13:38) Recently, a lot of papers have been published in the physics literature where people try to use standard file-compression algorithms, particularly the gzip implementation of the Lempel-Ziv algorithm, to estimate the algorithmic information content (a... http://bactra.org/notebooks/probably-algorithmically-true.html (17 Nov 2003 19:28) The following is merely an amusement; it contains (at least) one fatal error, one conclusion which is valid but phrased so as to mislead the unwary, and one unwarranted technical assumption (which may actually be OK but I haven't checked)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/plagues.html (06 Nov 2003 12:54) Recommended: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel Ewald, The Evolution of Infectious Disease Stephen Johnson, The Ghost Map William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History To read: John Arrizabalaga, John Henderson and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe Noble David Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492--1650 Alfred W... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bootstrap-entropy.html (31 Oct 2003 12:46) Speaking personally, I often want to know the entropy H[X] of a random variable X, where I do not know the distribution of X... http://bactra.org/notebooks/barzun.html (20 Sep 2003 17:09) French-American historian and educator, born 1907 into very modernist circles (his father disputed with another poet over the honor of having invented "simultaneous" poetry)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/revolution.html (23 May 2003 17:42) "... http://bactra.org/notebooks/conspiracy-theories.html (20 May 2003 11:51) The Mother of All Conspiracy Theories, at least in the West, goes something like this: There is an ubiquitous secret society in our midst, alien to our religion, which aims to seize control of the world, or at least the only part of it which counts, i... http://bactra.org/notebooks/popper.html (14 Apr 2003 14:00) Austrian-English philosopher, dead, alas, just as I began these notebooks... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stat-mech.html (01 Apr 2003 09:01) The first mathematical, natural science of emergent properties... http://bactra.org/notebooks/alchemy.html (11 Mar 2003 13:53) Origins in Hellenistic Egypt; in China; in India... http://bactra.org/notebooks/analogy.html (16 Feb 2003 16:27) One of my pet peeves is people saying "metaphor" when they mean "analogy"... http://bactra.org/notebooks/discourses-on-method.html (09 Feb 2003 16:18) These are books which do not so much describe how we actually think and believe, and acquire what passes for knowledge --- though they may present themselves that way, either deliberately or through self-misunderstanding --- but rather prescribe a way of thinking, believing, inquiring and speaking... http://bactra.org/notebooks/modernity.html (03 Feb 2003 17:01) The best definition of "post-modern" was that given by Patrick Scivenor in Egg on Your Interface: A Dictionary of Modern Nonsense, viz... http://bactra.org/notebooks/prophecy.html (19 Jan 2003 12:57) Amongst all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitious... http://bactra.org/notebooks/war.html (14 Jan 2003 12:50) Guerilla warfare, weapons technologies, command-and-control technologies, mechanized war, weapons proliferation... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ainu.html (30 Dec 2002 00:37) The Ainu are the aboriginal inhabitants of Japan; they look noticably un-Japanese --- superficially, rather more like people from western Asia, and the men have a truly remakrable amount of facial hair... http://bactra.org/notebooks/technological-change.html (01 Dec 2002 14:07) Origins of innovations... http://bactra.org/notebooks/italo-calvino.html (23 Nov 2002 19:24) Recommended: By Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies Cosmicomics Invisible Cities Mr... http://bactra.org/notebooks/intellectuals.html (23 Oct 2002 14:17) Intellect is the capitalized and communal form of live intelligence; it is intelligence stored up and made into habits of discipline, signs and symbols of meaning, chains of reasoning and spurs to emotion --- a shorthand and a wireless by which the mind can skip connectives, recognize ability, and communicate truth... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cybernetics.html (16 Oct 2002 15:27) A science which seems to have dissolved into the others... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bioinformatics.html (04 Oct 2002 14:31) An ugly name... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pornography.html (15 Apr 2002 12:58) Who consumes what... http://bactra.org/notebooks/eliade.html (22 Nov 2001 14:26) Heaven Heaven is a place Where nothing Nothing ever happens Romanian historian of religions... http://bactra.org/notebooks/novels.html (13 Oct 2001 15:57) Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers... http://bactra.org/notebooks/scientist-fiction.html (13 Oct 2001 15:57) By which I mean novels about the research life and the creative travails of scientists... http://bactra.org/notebooks/simulations.html (17 Apr 2001 12:16) Feynman's (famous, over-used, prophetic) words: The next great awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations... http://bactra.org/notebooks/qwerty.html (16 Mar 2001 13:00) Look at the first line of letters on your keyboard: QWERTYUIOP... http://bactra.org/notebooks/quine.html (07 Mar 2001 10:43) American logician and philosopher; perhaps the most eminent analytical philosopher of the late 20th century; a student of Whitehead, and largely in the spirit of the Logical Positivists, with a good dose of pragmatism mixed in; teacher of Daniel Dennett (whom I hope to see become the most eminent analytical philosopher of the early 21st century)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/social-construction-of-reality.html (30 Dec 2000 21:16) Something very peculiar occured to some members of Europe's educated classes around the beginning of the Renaissance: they read the ancients and realized the past was different from the present... http://bactra.org/notebooks/stories.html (30 Dec 2000 21:11) A pretentious word for "stories" — akin to calling movies you like "cinema" — but one we seem stuck with... http://bactra.org/notebooks/narrative-communities.html (10 Dec 2000 02:12) It's a bad name, and I apologize... http://bactra.org/notebooks/darcy-thompson.html (23 Jul 2000 17:03) D'Arcy Thompson was a British biologist and a classical scholar (translator of Aristotle's biological works, author of Greek Birds and Greek Fishes)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cassirer.html (01 Jun 2000 14:00) German philosopher and intellectual historian; escaped from the Nazis, first to Oxford, then to Goteborg and finally to Yale... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cherryh.html (15 May 2000 14:39) Got three passports, coupla visas Don't even know my real name C... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ashby.html (29 Nov 1999 17:38) British psychiatrist, one of the brighter lights of the early days of cybernetics, who is extremely little known for all the quality of his work and all the eminent people he influenced --- Herbert Simon, Norbert Wiener, Miller, Galanter & Pribram, Stuart Kauffman (see below), and so on... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evil-twins.html (14 Nov 1999 02:58) David Stove remarks (in The Plato Cult, p... http://bactra.org/notebooks/computational-mechanics.html (12 Jul 1999 19:33) (This notebook needs re-writing in a big way... http://bactra.org/notebooks/chomsky.html (24 Oct 1998 21:13) Notoriously, an American logician, linguist, cognitive scientist and anarchist political and historical writer... http://bactra.org/notebooks/biological-order.html (11 Oct 1998 11:00) The whole notion that living things are organized in hierarchical levels (monomers inside macromolecules inside membranes inside organelles inside cells inside organs inside organisms) seems to have been thrust upon a willing world in the '20s and '30s by people like Joseph Needham (his Order and Life is a really classic exposition) and Waddington and Woodger (qv... http://bactra.org/notebooks/demonology.html (09 Oct 1998 14:32) Demonology is, as its name suggests, the study of demons: which prompts the question, what a demon is... http://bactra.org/notebooks/indices.html (07 Oct 1998 13:34) From the Latin indicare, to indicate, to point out, itself from in, meaning not just what its English cognate does but also having the sense of ``into,'' and dicare, to proclaim --- an index is something which tells you the way to another thing; a pointer... http://bactra.org/notebooks/cultural-criticism.html (06 Jul 1998 16:40) Cultural criticism is what is practiced by cultural critics, the intellectuals formerly known as moralists and publicists, before those became dirty words... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ufos.html (11 Jun 1998 17:28) Probably most people have seen a UFO, in the strictest sense of the term --- that is, something in the sky they couldn't identify... http://bactra.org/notebooks/multilevel-marketing.html (11 Jun 1998 17:15) I recently had occasion to explain the notion of Amway to some foreign researchers here in Santa Fe... http://bactra.org/notebooks/gellner.html (28 May 1998 15:42) British philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist, self-described Enlightenment rationalist fundamentalist, born to Czech parents in Paris and raised in Prague, where he lived the last few years of his life, and died in 1995... http://bactra.org/notebooks/evol-comp.html (13 May 1998 18:20) There are lots of ways of getting a computer to mimic evolution, but the one I like best, and has the cleanest conceptual lines, is the "genetic algorithm" invented by John Holland... http://bactra.org/notebooks/john-holland.html (13 May 1998 17:58) First Ph... http://bactra.org/notebooks/commonwealth-of-letters-online.html (29 Apr 1998 11:53) If, as Leibniz has prophesied, libraries one day become cities, there will still be dark and dismal streets and alleyways as there are now... http://bactra.org/notebooks/too-much-information.html (28 Apr 1998 18:58) Facts don't do what I want them to Limits of human attention; filtering; searching; broad-catch; information overload (does it exist... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bramah-proverbs.html (07 Apr 1998 16:06) From The Wallet of Kai Lung It is a mark of insincerity of purpose to spend one's time in looking for the sacred Emperor in the low-class tea-shops... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bramah.html (07 Apr 1998 16:06) When I was sixteen, a senior in high school, and generally a bit of a nebbish, I made a shocking discovery in my parents' basement: the novels of Dorothy Sayers... http://bactra.org/notebooks/psychoceramics.html (09 Mar 1998 13:45) After all, to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks... http://bactra.org/notebooks/joseph-campbell.html (26 Nov 1997 21:51) Rejected, with all his works, but interesting... http://bactra.org/notebooks/claude-bernard.html (31 Oct 1997 13:23) Bernard's three great claims on posterity are that he was one of the founders of proper, experimental physiology; that he was, if not the first, then one of the first to recognize the importance of the "internal environment" of the organism; and that he was an excellent methodologist... http://bactra.org/notebooks/armchair-travel.html (29 Oct 1997 12:11) I like travelling, but in some ways I like reading about travel even more: I can fit it into my salary, for one thing, and for another it's sometimes fun to read about travelling to places I'd never really want to go, like Antarctica... http://bactra.org/notebooks/darwin.html (23 Oct 1997 12:52) See also Adaptation, Ecology and Evolution of course Recommended: Jacques Barzun, Darwin, Marx, Wagner: Critique of a Heritage [Much more interesting for the history of Darwin's reception and influence than for Barzun's attempts to critique biology] Anne Becker, The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin [Review] E... http://bactra.org/notebooks/information-society.html (10 Oct 1997 19:44) Does either exist... http://bactra.org/notebooks/manhattan-project.html (25 Sep 1997 18:03) When they split those atoms It's hotter than the sun There is a certain mode of writing history which looks for pivotal events --- often tolerably obscure ones --- and relates everything to what happened then, to the change which occured on That Day... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neurath.html (25 Jul 1997 12:48) Austrian sociologist, political economist and anti-philosopher; possibly the most unorthodox Marxist ever... http://bactra.org/notebooks/witch-craze.html (01 Jul 1997 12:28) Was there a witch-cult... http://bactra.org/notebooks/systems-theory.html (15 May 1997 15:42) ``Lord, I disbelieve; help Thou my unbelief... http://bactra.org/notebooks/unions.html (13 May 1997 11:03) My grand-father belonged to one (also to the Communist Party, but that's a story for another time); my mother belongs to one; I'm rather proud to belong to one --- in fact I was the physics department steward; my wife belongs to one... http://bactra.org/notebooks/von-neumann.html (06 May 1997 14:36) Johnny, as it seems everyone called him, was one of those people who are so bright it's hard to believe they were human... http://bactra.org/notebooks/futurism.html (05 May 1997 17:41) No, no, not mumbo-jumbo like Toffler or Spengler; I mean the modernist artistic movement founded in 1909 by F... http://bactra.org/notebooks/adaptation.html (05 May 1997 15:22) He marvelled at the fact that cats had two holes cut in their fur at precisely the spot where their eyes were... http://bactra.org/notebooks/julian-jaynes.html (05 May 1997 15:16) An ex-behaviorist psychologist, now best known for writing The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/j-t-bonner.html (03 May 1997 12:20) American developmental biologist, with a special devotion to cellular slime molds... http://bactra.org/notebooks/dangers-of-natural-foods.html (09 Apr 1997 11:14) In Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling imagines a movement away from natural foods towards synthetics on health grounds --- as one of his characters says, plants have spent millions of years perfecting chemical warfare on things which eat them... http://bactra.org/notebooks/superstition.html (07 Apr 1997 16:07) Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, religion; not allowed, superstition... http://bactra.org/notebooks/freud.html (03 Apr 1997 10:25) Austrian neuropathologist... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bak-on-brain.html (24 Mar 1997 12:37) The answer, Bak dixit, is yes... http://bactra.org/notebooks/dissipative-structures.html (28 Jan 1997 13:34) Ilya Prigogine (NL) coined the phrase, as a name for the patterns which self-organize in far-from-equilibrium dissipative systems... http://bactra.org/notebooks/voltaire.html (30 Nov 1996 05:57) Perfectly happy now, he looked at his estate... http://bactra.org/notebooks/memory.html (27 Jun 1996 22:58) Memories can't wait "Mnemotechnics," i... http://bactra.org/notebooks/development-dynamics.html (20 May 1996 01:34) Notes on the psychology lecture yesterday (22 February 1996), Prof... http://bactra.org/notebooks/darwin-machines.html (11 Mar 1996 01:32) Changing my shape I feel like an accident The idea that Darwianian principles are at work in lots of places; most especially that the brain is a (in Wm... http://bactra.org/notebooks/machlup.html (28 Feb 1996 17:14) Austrian-American economist, probably best known for The Production and Distribution of Knowledge in the United States (1962)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/campus-architecture.html (18 Feb 1996 17:54) William Irwin Thompson ... http://bactra.org/notebooks/intl-arms-trade.html (16 Feb 1996 18:46) Back in the palmy days of the Cold War, somewhere over seventy billion dollars of weaponry crossed borders each year --- as acts of trade and diplomacy, not war... http://bactra.org/notebooks/computer-networks.html (23 Jan 1996 16:12) We've got computers We're tapping phone lines We know that that ain't allowed Cultural, political, economic effects... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mernissi.html (21 Aug 1995 17:02) Feminist sociologist, formerly professor at the University of Mohammed V in Morocco (at least, a correspondent informs me she's no longer there); perhaps the most interesting Arab intellectual now being published in a European language... http://bactra.org/notebooks/czech-legions.html (19 Aug 1995 17:19) To begin with, you know, don't you, that the First World War ended in 1920, when the Allies, including the Americans and the Japanese, withdrew from Russia and Siberia... http://bactra.org/notebooks/jung.html (19 Aug 1995 15:31) As far as I can see, a crank, maybe even a kook... http://bactra.org/notebooks/menstruation.html (17 Aug 1995 19:07) Superstitions... http://bactra.org/notebooks/radiation-health.html (17 Aug 1995 16:51) Lots of radiation is bad for you, of course, but how much is lots, and what about a little... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nimrod.html (17 Aug 1995 15:51) Connections to legends of Archer Yi, shamanism, Prometheus... http://bactra.org/notebooks/bauhaus.html (16 Aug 1995 21:25) I once asked Mies van der Rohe, then my faculty colleage at Illinois Institute of technology, how he got the opportunity to build the Tugendhat house --- a startlingly modern design at the time of its construction... http://bactra.org/notebooks/possession.html (26 Mar 1995 18:45) Certain rash people have asserted that, just as there are no mice where there are no cats, so no one is possessed where there are no exorcists... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neuropsychiatry.html (25 Mar 1995 15:11) Talk to your analyst Isn't that what he's paid for... http://bactra.org/notebooks/universal-images.html (22 Mar 1995 18:15) Universal images first... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ai-and-folly.html (22 Mar 1995 17:30) Natural minds evolved for specific purposes - survival under constraints of finite knowledge, intelligence, and time to act... http://bactra.org/notebooks/winding-number.html (22 Mar 1995 11:54) Take a rubber band... http://bactra.org/notebooks/catholics-cyberspace.html (19 Mar 1995 20:24) Teilhard and McLuhan were both Catholics... http://bactra.org/notebooks/renormalized-signs.html (16 Mar 1995 06:50) The post-structuralists talk about endless chains of signifiers floating loose without connecting to signifieds... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nanotech.html (16 Mar 1995 05:06) Machines the size of molecules, built atom-by-atom --- the way living things are... http://bactra.org/notebooks/tubal-cain.html (16 Mar 1995 04:50) According to Genesis 4:22, ``instructor of every artificer in brass and iron... http://bactra.org/notebooks/e.e.cummings.html (13 Mar 1995 21:01) One of my favorite poets, though intellectually we disagree about as deeply as possible... http://bactra.org/notebooks/complex-adaptive-systems.html (13 Mar 1995 20:53) I say we call them adapters, and send ``complex'' home to get some rest, but no one listens to me... http://bactra.org/notebooks/shamanism.html (13 Mar 1995 19:04) Recommended: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy E... http://bactra.org/notebooks/christopher-alexander.html (13 Mar 1995 18:48) An architect, and a professor at U... http://bactra.org/notebooks/spies.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Rob Johnston, Analytic Culture in the U... http://bactra.org/notebooks/science.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Scientific method and philosophy of science, sociology of science and history of science merit their own entires... http://bactra.org/notebooks/scientific-instruments.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) especially artistic ones, especially during the Enlightenment To read: Science Preserved (antique instruments in UK; inc... http://bactra.org/notebooks/yi.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Connections to Nimrod or Herakles legends, shamanism... http://bactra.org/notebooks/social-engineering.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) By which, following Popper, I mostly mean the piece-meal design of institutions, and methods for trying to cope with their side-effects... http://bactra.org/notebooks/wild-hunt.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Detailed accounts... http://bactra.org/notebooks/soviets.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Theoretical justification... http://bactra.org/notebooks/vergil.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) I've read Davidson's Phoenix and Mirror and Vergil in Averno, and will happily pay good money for a copy of the later... http://bactra.org/notebooks/singapore.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) History... http://bactra.org/notebooks/tibet.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) The Buddha was amiable and enlightened; on his deathbed he laughed at his disciples for supposing that he was immortal... http://bactra.org/notebooks/tao-chia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Connections to shamanism and alchemy; the odd, proto-scientific, proto-socialist interpretation of Joseph Needham; its degeneration into superstition; its ties to Legalism and proto-industrialists (e... http://bactra.org/notebooks/swarms.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) In contemporary science (e... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sufism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) And science in Islam... http://bactra.org/notebooks/teilhard.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) And computer networks, esp... http://bactra.org/notebooks/whitehead.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) See also: Mathematical Logic; Bertrand Russell To read: The Aims of Education Adventures of Ideas The Concept of Nature [online] Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead [Worshipfully transcribed by Lucien Price] Introduction to Mathematics Science and the Modern World Symbolism A Treatise on Universal Algebra [online] http://bactra.org/notebooks/whole-earth.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Ideology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/wm-carlos-williams.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) American poet and doctor; one of my favorite poets... http://bactra.org/notebooks/zen.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Myths of the sect... http://bactra.org/notebooks/tuan-yi-fu.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Recommended: The Good Life Passing Strange and Wonderful Cosmos and Hearth Escapism Morality and Imagination Segmented Worlds and Self Landscapes of Fear To read: China Dear Colleagues Dominance and Affection: THe Making of Pets Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes and Values Who Am I... http://bactra.org/notebooks/vampires.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Transformation from folklore to populare culture; loss of demonic quality; ``end of evil'' Recommended: Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial and Death... http://bactra.org/notebooks/world-bank.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) And apocalyptic rumors... http://bactra.org/notebooks/southeast-asia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:03) Including Indonesia and the Philippines... http://bactra.org/notebooks/philosophy-of-mind.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) The academic discpline formerly known as philosophical psychology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/particle-physics.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) And all I see is little dots Some are smears some are spots It's not just a discipline (cf... http://bactra.org/notebooks/physiology-of-tv.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) It is said that changing the rate at which the screen flickers makes it less compelling... http://bactra.org/notebooks/neutral-monism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) The idea that neither mind nor matter is ``ontologically basic,'' but that both are composed, or constructed, or however-you-will, out of some more basic ``stuff... http://bactra.org/notebooks/rifkin.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) A dangerous loon... http://bactra.org/notebooks/molecular-biology.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) I believe it was Watson who deeply offended many of his colleagues by saying that there is one biology, and it is molecular... http://bactra.org/notebooks/schizophrenia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Descriptions, especially memoirs (Mark Vonnegut's Eden Express is very good)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/new-age-music.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) esp... http://bactra.org/notebooks/policy.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) To read: Michael X... http://bactra.org/notebooks/magic.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) And science... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mettrie.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) 18th century French doctor and materialist, most notorious for his tract Man a Machine (L'Homme machine), which I've put on-line... http://bactra.org/notebooks/peirce.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Recommended: Ian Hacking, The Taming of Chance [The last chapter is on Peirce's ideas] Deborah Mayo, Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge [See my review, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, or, Long Live Peircism-Popperism-Neyman-Pearson Thought... http://bactra.org/notebooks/middle-east.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) An unfortunate and uninformative name... http://bactra.org/notebooks/millay.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Recommended, about: Cristina Nehring, ``Last the Night: The Abiding Genius of Edna St... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mcluhan.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Views... http://bactra.org/notebooks/madison.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) At the turn of the century and in the '60s http://bactra.org/notebooks/physics.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) It is, after all, my profession... http://bactra.org/notebooks/religion.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) I'm particularly interested in what one might call, with a nod towards Mr... http://bactra.org/notebooks/rome.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) A sub-set of classical antiquity as a whole... http://bactra.org/notebooks/personal-violence.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) As opposed to organized violence, like war... http://bactra.org/notebooks/conversion.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) And brain-washing... http://bactra.org/notebooks/proto-industrialism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Manufacturing goods in quantity for export sale, before industrial machinery... http://bactra.org/notebooks/phoenicians.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Their explorations, and the ancient trade routes generally... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ottomans.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Its history and culture... http://bactra.org/notebooks/runaway-tech.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) The crudest form of human control is pulling the plug, if necessary by nuking the machines... http://bactra.org/notebooks/ozawa.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) By all reports, Mr... http://bactra.org/notebooks/republics.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Constitutions and their variety... http://bactra.org/notebooks/race.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Recommended: Richard T... http://bactra.org/notebooks/new-physics.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) There seems to be a new "new physics", in the popular mind, every few decades since the end of the nineteenth century... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mass-media.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Manipulation of; manipulation by; effects on thought, behavior, emotions, expectations, society... http://bactra.org/notebooks/san-francisco.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) history, culture, cultural exports Recommended: Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco Rebecca Solnit, River of Shadows To read: Gray A... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mutazilites.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Ties to pre-Islamic philosophy; science; democratic politics; Sufism; feminism... http://bactra.org/notebooks/post-industrialism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Evidence for and against... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mysticism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Time isn't holding us Time isn't after us Physiology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/sardinia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) the nuraghi; classical civilizations; Muslim presence See: The History of Sardinia [Slights the Saracens, and the English needs a bit of work] To read: Grazia Deledda (novelist) Robert J... http://bactra.org/notebooks/pseudo-events.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Earliest history, e... http://bactra.org/notebooks/needham.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) His contributions to biology and the history of science... http://bactra.org/notebooks/lumpenproletariat.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Are they the same... http://bactra.org/notebooks/regulation.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) A particular instance of social institutions, important for social engineering... http://bactra.org/notebooks/migraine.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Neurology... http://bactra.org/notebooks/mass-hysteria.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Recommended: Malcolm Gladwell, ``Is the Belgian Coca-Cola hysteria the real thing... http://bactra.org/notebooks/yin-yang-chia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Especially the ``Yin-Yang Chia'' and its founder, Tsou Yen... http://bactra.org/notebooks/masscult.html (03 Oct 1994 12:02) Revisiting this notebook after many years, I find myself uncomfortable with this category, which I basically got from reading a lot of mid-20th century cultural criticism (McCarthy and Macdonald, especially)... http://bactra.org/notebooks/fraud-1.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Hegel, Heidegger, Teilhard de Chardin, Foucault, Spengler, Fichte, Lacan... http://bactra.org/notebooks/history-of-technology.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) To read: Robert McC... http://bactra.org/notebooks/intellectual-standards.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) How well have people thought in different places and times... http://bactra.org/notebooks/epics.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Recommended (examples): Norman Cohn (trans... http://bactra.org/notebooks/lichtenberg.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) 18th century German physicist and writer... http://bactra.org/notebooks/russell-jacoby.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) American intellectual historian and cultural critic... http://bactra.org/notebooks/frazer.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) The Golden Bough... http://bactra.org/notebooks/liquid-crystals.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) In normal crystalline solids, molecules or atoms sit in fixed locations, arranged in a pattern which repeats itself over space... http://bactra.org/notebooks/fraud-2.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Joseph Campbell, Alvin Toffler, Capra, R... http://bactra.org/notebooks/epicureanism.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Science, attakcs on religion and superstition, (moderate) sensual pleasure and peace of mind: what's not to like... http://bactra.org/notebooks/irreligion.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) To read: Lee Carter, Lucifer's Handbook E... http://bactra.org/notebooks/lost-tribes-of-israel.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) There are none, of course; but the tenacity of the myth is fascinating... http://bactra.org/notebooks/czechoslovakia.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) To Read: D... http://bactra.org/notebooks/jehovah.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Religious apocalypses and the like - Armageddon, the Millennium. http://bactra.org/notebooks/intellectual-immunity.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Or, if not being able to come up with a good idea of your own, knowing a bad idea when you see one... http://bactra.org/notebooks/initiation-rites.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) When I was younger, and very interested in mythology and ritual, I read a lot about initiation rites, especially in writers like Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell... http://bactra.org/notebooks/future-shock.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Empirical evidence for it today... http://bactra.org/notebooks/exile.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) To read: David M... http://bactra.org/notebooks/robert-graves.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) His mythological views, their roots and their influence... http://bactra.org/notebooks/hildegard.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) The late +XX view of her as a feminist saint... http://bactra.org/notebooks/history.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Cf... http://bactra.org/notebooks/etruscans.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) To read: H... http://bactra.org/notebooks/genocide-history.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Starting with the Armenians and Assyrians in +XX... http://bactra.org/notebooks/finns.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Myths, esp... http://bactra.org/notebooks/input-output.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) The basic idea is that the outputs of some industries are the inputs of others, and you can keep track of this with a matrix... http://bactra.org/notebooks/goliards.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Parallels in other cultures; in industrial cultures... http://bactra.org/notebooks/nemesis.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) Secular theories of how the world is going to end anyhow --- whether as a ``collateral casualty'' of human affairs, or more impersonally through being hit by big rocks... http://bactra.org/notebooks/literature.html (03 Oct 1994 12:01) In ``Canon to the Right of Me,'' Katha Pollitt correctly points out that one reason the canon debate in Amer