Interesting Links for 09-12-2013

[andrewducker]

• Dammit - I want the Technomancer Digital Wizard Hoodie. And to be 12 again.
  (tags: technology clothing awesome )
• Why Life Does Not Really Exist
  (tags: life science meaning complexity )
• Some fascinating writing on interrogation
  (tags: interrogation )
• I have no idea what you're supposed to do if your child is a psychopath (warning: All the trigger

Comments

Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[cartesiandaemon]

It's always disappointing when an important concept turns out not to have a clear definitive dividing border, but I think it's anticipating the problem to assume that all concepts which don't have clear borders without fuzzy edge cases are completely useless. Most important concepts have some fuzzy edge cases, sometimes big ones -- that doesn't mean that there's some important difference between a man and a rock, even if it turns out that it's more accurate to say a machine has a little bit of it, rather than none of it.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[andrewducker]

Yup. Particularly with concepts that radically predates the scientific method, and therefore had a very fuzzy definition that was never really written down, or depended on non-scientific concepts.

"Species" is another interesting one, with odd corner cases.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[danieldwilliam]

And, according to Richard Dawkins, species is an almost useless concept when discussing things with non-sexual reproduction.

Re: Why Life Does Not Really Exist

[cartesiandaemon]

Yeah, exactly, although instead of "corner cases" it's probably better to say ""all life, with exceptions that happen to be easy for humans to observe and classify" :)

[simont]

*nods* My usual line on this is to say that no concept outside pure mathematics is 100% sharply defined, and that that doesn't generally stop them from being useful to us. I think my favourite example of a useful concept with really very badly defined boundaries is 'game'.

(Even in pure maths there are some surprisingly woolly ideas lurking among all the ones with completely exact definitions - 'concentration of measure' springs to mind, as does 'in general position'.)

[cartesiandaemon]

Even in pure maths there are some surprisingly woolly ideas lurking among all the ones with completely exact definitions

In fact, I think this happens in maths all the time, when you're deciding whether some example SHOULD be included in some label or not, it's just that maths takes the next step of explicitly saying "OK, now pick one or the other and write it down and stick to it for the duration of this paper".

Eg. in any particular problem, it's almost always what domain you draw from if you say "number", but without context, it's just as wooly as anything else. Natural numbers: almost always a number (unless you're doing modular arithmetic). Rational numbers, real numbers, imaginary numbers: embraced wholeheartedly by mathematicians but not as clearcut as natural numbers. Infinities, surreal numbers, quaternians, are they described as "numbers"? Well, they meet MOST of the criteria, but also fall short in some important ways...

[andrewducker]

Game: An artificial rule system with defined winning conditions.

I'm sure there are some things that some people would define as games that wouldn't fall into it, but I think it's pretty comprehensive.

If it doesn't have winning conditions then it's not a "game", it's a "toy" - purely sandbox computer games are toys. The winning conditions in many roleplaying games are not entirely formal - but there's general acceptance that you're largely trying to beat a challenge laid down by the GM.

(You could add something about competition if you wanted to rule out single-player games)

[del_c]

Twilight, proving there is no such thing as day or night!

[cartesiandaemon]

LOL!