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…
Stories in the history of written language (part 4)
In this part, we will look at some of the uses that writing and words have had over time, as well as some of the technology that has facilitated writing. Seals, stamps, and signatures Writing has long been used for more than literal communication and artistic calligraphy. From very early on, certain acts of writing…
“Humility and a willingness to be corrected”
This phrase comes from a video by Erica “Gutsick Gibbon” on YouTube. In the video, she describes how important it is for scholars especially to put what they think the know out there for criticism because it’s the only way to learn and get better. On my About the Author page, I have the following…
thoughts on mind 