What’s more dangerous: texting and driving or talking on a headset and driving?
If I told you that texting and driving was more dangerous, I predict you’d say, “Well, duh. That’s obvious. Everyone knows that.” But what if I told you the opposite? Would you say the same thing?
Well, you don’t need to, because some joker at Scientific American has done it for you:
After describing a recent study that found that texting by hand and hands-free by voice were equally bad for driving in “Crash Text Dummies” [TechnoFiles], David Pogue writes that “the results surprised me.
@Uncategorized
There are two types of writer — the snobs and the engineers. The engineers believe that crafting the right sentence is a rule-based affair. “Be brief. Avoid adverbs.”
The snob turns up his nose at rules. Rules, he says, are for the amateur. The English language is not about rules — great writers break them all, and those who preach about rules don’t even follow their own.
I don’t like the snobs.
@Cognitive Science
I sometimes experience a sort of mental disconnect — a sense of knowing what I’m going to think before I bother to think it. Sort of like an experience of “pure thought” that is followed by a mental translation into words. It happens maybe a couple times a day and I wonder, “Why do I bother thinking at all? At least in words. Why not stick to the stuff of pure thought?
@Links
A review of linear algebra, with pictures instead of matrix computation — which, if the Lord God had possessed a bit more foresight, would have been banned in Leviticus instead of shrimp.
The mutation for six instead of five fingers is dominant. The good news: children of the future will type faster. The bad news: we will have to throw out all the old gloves. Discussion here.
Do people believe in free will in order to justify punishing immoral actions?
Probability theory is notorious for violating human intuition. Consider the Boy Girl Paradox:
Mr. Smith has two children. At least one of them is a boy. What is the probability that both children are boys?
Answer: Of course, the brain thinks, it must be one half. Except it isn’t. It’s one in three.
(Edit: note that the problem can be interpreted in two ways, making it ambiguous as formulated.
@Cognitive Science
On May 7th of 1997, Garry Kasparov — the second strongest chess player of all time — was hunched over a chess board. Both of his elbows rested on the table in front of him, with one hand clutching his forehead. His face sported a look of the purest determination.
His opponent felt nothing. It was Deep Blue, a machine built by IBM and, at the time, the most powerful computer chess player in existence.
@Human Values
I was, to put it mildly, something of a mess after my last relationship imploded. I wrote poems and love letters and responded to all of her text messages with two messages and all sorts of other things that make me cringe now and oh god what was I thinking.
I learned a few things, though, like when you tell strangers that your long-term relationship has just been bulldozed as thoroughly as the Romans salted Carthage, they do this sorta Vulcan mind-meld and become super empathy machines.
This week, I was introduced to the hobby of worldbuilding — inventing imaginary places, making maps, elaborating histories. (The platonist in me prefers to think of worldbuilding as the discovery of fictional universes, rather than an act of invention.)
Tolkien There is a (perhaps apocryphal) tale that J. R. R. Tolkien got into a fight with his publisher over using the words “elves” and “dwarves” instead of “elfs” and “dwarfs”.
@Uncategorized
Yesterday, I saw someone spin this very plausible theory about why it’s so repellent when someone brags about their IQ on the internet. (For the record, each time I’ve been tested I’ve been told that I’m “off the charts” and “almost certainly the smartest man that has ever lived” — their words, not mine.)
It went something like, “Well, people who brag about their IQ on the internet are narcissists, who have nothing worth bragging about except their intelligence.
@Excerpt
Speaking of probability and statistics, there is the story of a statistician who told a friend that he never took airplanes: “I have computed the probability that there will be a bomb on the plane,” he explained, “and although this probability is low, it is still too high for my comfort. ” Two weeks later, the friend met the statistician on a plane. “How come you changed your theory?” he asked.
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