This is a fascinating example of an application of AI. The current discourse around AI can be pretty negative as many of the downsides are apparent and widespread. However, AI has many good uses as well. Like any technology, its effect on the world depends on its user. We are in a period of mass…
Author: Kenneth
Cat owner, educator, learner
It’s what plants crave
What are electrolytes and how do they work? And do plants crave them? Let’s start with… Ions An ion is an electrically charged particle, often an atom with a “missing” or “extra” electron. Molecules can be held together by ionic bonds in which oppositely charged atoms are attracted to each other by electrostatic forces. A…
How compression works and why JPEG artifacts look like that
Do I look like I know what a JPEG is? In a computer, all information is represented as bits, strings of zeros and ones. However, bits can more or less be interpreted as generic numerical data written in base 2 instead of as decimals. In other words, in a computer, all information is represented as…
The state of math in the world today
I went to the grocery store today and at the self checkout, one of my items was not recognized by the barcode scanner. It scanned successfully, but it wasn’t in the system and couldn’t give a price. An employee came over to help. He was young, no older than his 20s, though he looked like…
Stories in the history of written language (part 5)
Magic words, mysticism, curses, and prayer A long-held belief within virtually every culture across the world is that language has a special power to affect the physical, mental, or spiritual. There are some prominent examples that are worth looking at in more detail. There are essentially two ways in which a written word can have…
Organic almonds and climate change denial: the modern conspiracy crowd
NaturalNews.com is one of the strangest sites I’ve come across. Thinking about it more, however, it’s not very strange at all. This is the state of the modern conspiracy crowd. I used to think that, when it came to people like antivaxxers, there was a tenuous alliance between left-wing New Age types and right-wing traditionalist…
Equality, equity, equivalence, identity, indistinguishability, isomorphism, resemblance, congruence, and similarity
While the title of this post might as well be a thesaurus entry, my purpose here is to investigate the differences between these concepts and how they operate in different contexts. Mathematical equality The reader is almost certainly very familiar with the equals sign or = used in math. Many of us first encounter it…
Being nothing
I am what I am not. I am not what I am. Jean-Paul Sartre The concept horse is not a concept. Gottlob Frege What is the self? This is my interpretation. It is unique among things in the world in that it is a subject, while everything else consists of objects. The self is not…
I like nonsense the best
I have often said that my favorite way to sort objects is alphabetically by color name. For example, if your objects are colored red, yellow, green, blue, and purple, then you would put the blue one first, followed by green, then purple, red, and finally yellow. But why? Partly for humor. I think it’s funny…
Article share: ‘Bun in the oven’ is an ancient pregnancy metaphor. This historian says it has to go
October 31, 2023 NPR article by Selena Simmons-Duffin It’s a kind of cutesy little way of saying that someone is pregnant to say they have “a bun in the oven.” That metaphor is really old – it first appears in texts by Hippocrates about 2,000 years ago to describe the process of gestation. But if…
thoughts on mind 