Bayle Shanks's website: notes-misc-miscMisc

interesting quote:

" "It's possible to argue that films such as The Matrix, Terminator II and T3 are structured like video games, each with plots that feature levels of increasing difficulty," says the study. "

-- A study by the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association

if i have the album "turn blue" by The Black Keys on my Android phone in the play store in a list of potential albums to buy, the icon/album picture is a spiral. If i then scroll up and down, one of those magnetic lines of force of a bar magnet-like pictures appears. Are the typical magnetic lines of force of a bar magnet a Moire pattern of two superimposed pictures of a spiral displaced slightly vertically? If so, does this mean anything for the physics of electromagnetism? Also, i recall that magnetism was shown to be a relativistic consequence of moving electrons; is that related?

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hard work: hard work is indeed the largest controllable determinant of success, and it is also a virtue. However, one thing to be aware of is that you may have more demands on your time than you can satisfy even if you work hard. In this case, you will have to choose how much time to spend on each thing, and the effects of depriving some things of your time will be the same as if that was the only thing you had to do and you weren't working hard. Obvious implications: (a) if you work hard overall, this doesn't necessarily mean you are giving any specific thing enough time, (b) even if you work hard overall, you may not be seen as a hard worker if your efforts are divided, (c) this is yet another reason not to overcommit.

3 notions of "difficult":

expense, including willpower (eg stay on a diet)
little chance of ultimate success/not everyone can do it (eg olympics; but not 'she sells sea shells' bc everyone can do that with practice)
propensity for unexpected setbacks (eg philosophy)

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wow this is so accurate:

https://twitter.com/wwwtxt

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you know that saying that in chemistry is really physics, physics is really math, etc? i have something to add:

in practice, working on anything tends to consist of mastering/doing the practical minutia associated with it. Eg data mining is really writing simple routines to transform data from one format to another, business is really scheduling phone calls, filling out forms, making powerpoints, etc.

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it's easier to understand sentences that don't have negation (or have less instances of negation).

The concept of a "best x" can often be substituted for "there is no y better than x".

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we don't know anything

specialist subfields vs textbooks
general 101 fields (eg polysci, macro econ, neuro, nutrition, clinical psychology)
- beginning of a long, long journey of discovery
- physics, chemistry, physiology are exceptions; they're too easy! (in that: apparent 'hard' operationally measurably objects of study; not too expensive to do experiments; experiments can be done on either inanimate objects or animals, forestalling certain ethical objections (unless you care about animals..)
media portrayals of something you know something about

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there needs to be a 'futurist scenarios' wiki which gives brief standardized names or identifiers to scenarios (and 'possibilities', which are attributes of scenarios, eg 'teleportation invented' is a possibility, 'US GDP rises by 50% from 2015 to 2020' is (still only part of) a scenario) like tvtropes.org does for 'tropes' (note; some tropes on tvtropes.org are also scenarios)

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http://lifehacker.com/all-the-first-aid-stuff-thats-changed-since-you-first-l-1742121480

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in Sandman, Dream plays "the oldest game" with a demon. "The oldest game" turns out to be one where each participant imagines themselves to be whatever they want. This seems like a particularly Dream kind of game (no wonder he won). What would be the analogs for the other Endless?

Death: i'm not sure; maybe peek-a-boo? Destiny: flip a coin Destruction: dueling Delight/Delirium: tickling Desire: seduction Despair: i'm not sure (maybe prisoner's dilemma?)

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conditional rationality: eg consider going to a casino with slot machines that let you choose how much to wager on each spin. You know the expected value is negative, so it's rational not to play. But what if you have already decided to play until either you lose $100, or you win $100? In this case it's rational to bet it all immediately (b/c the more iterations you play, by the law of large numbers (sorta?) the more the outcome will tend to converge to the expectation).

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" Anthropologists tend to use a method called “ethnography” as a way of negotiating design validity. The method gets characterized in many different ways, but I find it useful to think about ethnography as requiring you to go into situations that are more-or-less foreign to you and to put your own intuition and assumptions to sleep. You get input from “natives” about how they view those situations, and then you wake your own intuition back up in order to translate what you’ve learned into something that looks like a coherent and reasonable story to you. You then take that story back and revise it until it seems like a coherent and reasonable story to them too. It’s iterated, negotiated story-telling. " [1]

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" "You Are Not a Gadget." One of Lanier's points in that book is that technology can both augment expression and bound it. The Like Button is a classic example of bounding because it reduces your thoughts and feelings about a piece of content to a thumbs up, whereas a simple textbox would let you note whatever you want about the content (text is also harder to monetize and analyze and control).

I personally have been noticing more and more how technology and algorithms seem to bounding expression online and off, particularly around content creation, but also with influencers and personal branding and so on. " --