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Jon Gauthier
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"People say a good part of Nietzsche's fans are <25-year-old males. Guess I should give him a chance before it's too late. (But really—why haven't I red this yet??)" — Feb 12, 2018 06:36PM
"People say a good part of Nietzsche's fans are <25-year-old males. Guess I should give him a chance before it's too late. (But really—why haven't I red this yet??)" — Feb 12, 2018 06:36PM
Jon Gauthier
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"Dan J is interested in this, so maybe I should be, too. Scheduled for consumption this weekend. (This will be yet another return to a classic I haven't thought about in a long time. Should be fun!)" — Oct 06, 2017 06:06AM
"Dan J is interested in this, so maybe I should be, too. Scheduled for consumption this weekend. (This will be yet another return to a classic I haven't thought about in a long time. Should be fun!)" — Oct 06, 2017 06:06AM
“I will say that in the course of my work ... I began to suspect that the "letter from the stars" was, for us who attempted to decipher it, a kind of psychological association test, a particularly complex Rorschach test. For as a subject, believing he sees in the colored blotches angels or birds of ill omen, in reality fills in the vagueness of the thing shown with what is "on his mind," so did we attempt, behind the veil of incomprehensible signs, to discern the presence of what lay, first and foremost, within ourselves.”
― His Master's Voice
― His Master's Voice
“In the speech sound wave, one word runs into the next seamlessly; there are no little silences between spoken words the way there are white spaces between written words. We simply hallucinate word boundaries when we reach the end of a stretch of sound that matches some entry in our mental dictionary.”
― The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
― The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language
“What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to entertain ourselves.”
―
―
“So, thought Herzog, acknowledging that his imagination of the universe was elementary, the novae bursting and the worlds coming into being, the invisible magnetic spokes by means of which bodies kept one another in orbit. Astronomers made it all sound as though the gases were shaken up inside a flask. Then after many billions of years, light-years, this childlike but far from innocent creature, a straw hat on his head, and a heart in his breast, part pure, part wicked, who would try to form his own shaky picture of this magnificent web.”
― Herzog
― Herzog
“If we increase r [in a logistic map] even more, we will eventually force the system into a period-8 limit cycle, then a period-16 cycle, and so on. The amount that we have to increase r to get another period doubling gets smaller and smaller for each new bifurcation. This cascade of period doublings is reminiscent of the race between Achilles and the tortoise, in that an infinite number of bifurcations (or time steps in the race) can be confined to a local region of finite size. At a very special critical value, the dynamical system will fall into what is essentially an infinite-period limit cycle. This is chaos.”
― The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
― The Computational Beauty of Nature: Computer Explorations of Fractals, Chaos, Complex Systems, and Adaptation
Linguistics
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— last activity Jan 10, 2015 07:39PM
Would you like to talk about language? Do you like reading about language? Then this is your group :)
Goodreads Librarians Group
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Goodreads Librarians are volunteers who help ensure the accuracy of information about books and authors in the Goodreads' catalog. The Goodreads Libra ...more
EconTalk
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— last activity Feb 23, 2013 02:07PM
Group for the discussion and listing of the books promoted in the excellent EconTalk podcast.
Stanford Symbolic Systems
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— last activity May 10, 2017 07:52PM
Members of the Stanford Symbolic Systems community — undergraduate and graduate students in cognitive science, AI, linguistics, philosophy, psychology ...more
Jon’s 2025 Year in Books
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