I think I just figured something out about why I clash with people who rely more on etiquette than I do in their social lives ( Read more... )

"Now it is customary to speak of signals as 'conveying information', as though information were a kind of commodity. But signals do not convey information as railway trucks carry coal. Rather we should say: signals have an information content by virtue of their potential for making selections. Signals operate upon the alternatives forming the ( Read more... )

( my last post on finance for a long time, because I have little else to say )

As the marginal cost of transmitting information tends toward zero, the overhead associated with processing it tends toward infinity.

Science and Zen are ways of liberation that naturally complement eachother: Science questions everything outwardly, liberating us slowly and fitfully from the thrall of doxa (opinion); to consistently practice science as a way of life is to recognize that there is no belief that will hold come what may. Likewise, the Great Doubt cultivated by Zen ( Read more... )

Adding noise to a system may not seem generally desirable, but there are plenty of situations where it actually is: Non-stick surfaces are engineered to be as noisy as possible at the molecular level because regularities make it easier for some substances to grip onto the surface; the algorithms controlling robotic vacuum cleaners cause them to ( Read more... )

"No economist has yet succeeded in making a fortune by buying or selling commodities on the basis of his scientific prediction of future prices (even though some may have done so by selling such predictions)."
-Friedrich Hayek, "The Theory of Complex Phenomena"
In a past life I considered becoming an economics major, and in my current incarnation I ( Read more... )

Ergodicity is highly important and highly obscure mathematical concept, whose gist is much easier to communicate than most mathematicians make it seem. All it means is that if you have an ensemble of objects whose behavior over time you're interested in, the behavior of each individual object over the relevant period of time should be ( Read more... )

If DNA is information, then fucking is an attempt at communication. Given that the human genome clocks in at about 3 gigabits of information, a quickie has better bandwidth than a 56k connection. I will leave it as an exercise to the reader to tease out the applications of this for the construction of nerdy innuendo.