“ The thing is, after college I moved to New York City and became a writer and met some people who shared my obsessions, and I ditched the Forsterian narrator thing, and then I wasn’t that awkward or isolated anymore. According to the diagnostic manual, Asperger syndrome is ‘a continuous and lifelong disorder,’ but my symptoms had vanished.”
— Benjamin Nugent on the DSM-5
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Posts tagged with science
Touching Dynamical Systems
Bret Victor (a former Apple engineer who helped put the magic into iOS) has built what I can only describe as an amazing demo for studying dynamical systems:
A user interface for exploring systems of differential equations. Every variable is shown as a plot; every parameter has a knob that can be adjusted in realtime. This ubiquitous visualization and in-context-manipulation helps the user develop a sense for how the parameters of the system influence its behavior.
I can’t wait until I am using tools like his for my own research and teaching.
A Lingering Attachment
George Soros (via AZspot):
The adoption of Orwellian techniques gave the Republican propaganda machine a competitive advantage in electoral politics. The other side has tried to catch up with them but has been hampered by a lingering attachment to the pursuit of truth.
A great turn of phrase, but it made me think of another batch of excellent prose (I read just before seeing this Soros bit) from Andrew Sullivan who seems to argue it’s less self-interested deceit and perhaps a bit more like self-delusion. He quotes Fareed Zakaria:
We need more market mechanisms to cut medical costs, but Republicans don’t bother to study existing health care systems anywhere else in the world. They resemble the old Marxists, who refused to look around at actual experience. “I know it works in practice,” the old saw goes, “but does it work in theory?”
Sullivan then adds:
Back in the 1980s, conservatism was a thrilling empirical, reality-based challenge to overweening government power and omniscient liberal utopianism. Today, alas, it has become a victim of its own success, reliving past glories rather than tackling current problems. … Now it’s Levin-land: either total freedom or complete slavery and a rhetorical war based entirely on that binary ideological spectrum. In other words, ideological performance art: brain-dead, unaware of history, uninterested in policy detail, bored by empiricism, motivated primarily by sophistry, Manicheanism, and factional hatred. This is not without exceptions. … In contrast, today’s unconservative “conservatism” is a movement held together by cultural resentment and xenophobic panic.
“ If you come up with a new theory, you’ll want to do two things: (a) demonstrate that it predicts things you already know, and (b) use it to make new predictions. To develop, understand, and validate a theory, you have to do a lot of (a)… in order to be ready to do (b).”
— Andrew Gelman
“ Nature has neither rewards nor punishments, only consequences.”
— Edwin Land
