Category: Food For Thought


Why Lucky Charms Sometimes Work: The Powerful Positive Performance Psychology Of Superstition

In a test conducted by researchers from the University of Cologne, participants on a putting green who were told they were playing with a “lucky ball” sank 6.4 putts out of 10, nearly two more putts, on average, than those who weren’t told the ball was lucky. That is a 35% improvement. The results suggest new thinking in how to view luck and are intriguing to behavorial psychologists.


Gödel’s incompleteness theorems – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first incompleteness theorem states that no consistent system of axioms whose theorems can be listed by an “effective procedure” (e.g., a computer program, but it could be any sort of algorithm) is capable of proving all truths about the relations of the natural numbers (arithmetic). For any such system, there will always be statements about the natural numbers that are true, but that are unprovable within the system. The second incompleteness theorem, a corollary of the first, shows that such a system cannot demonstrate its own consistency.


Jenn 3d

Jenn is a toy for playing with various quotients of Cayley graphs of finite Coxeter groups on four generators. Jenn builds the graphs using the Todd-Coxeter algorithm, embeds them into the 3-sphere, and stereographically projects them onto euclidean 3-space. (The models really live in the hypersphere so they looked curved in our flat space.) Jenn has some basic motion models governing the six degrees of freedom of rotation of the hypersphere.


A Theory on the Deja Vu Phenomenon, Déjà vu

A physiological explanation of the déjà vu phenomenon may exist. The optical and neural paths from the two eyes may be slightly different, or the processing of such signals might be delayed in one path due to some variant structure. Alternately, a “newer” and “older” brain processing method might be responsible, both of which HAVE been detected in physiological research.


An Introduction to Dynamical Systems and Chaos

This tutorial will develop the basic ingredients necessary for modeling and understanding simple (and not so simple) non-linear dynamical systems. The goal of these exercises are to demonstrate you that you can develop significant insight into the behavior of complicated non-linear systems with just a little math, a little art and a little modeling software. By themselves, these tools can lead to frustration. However, when combined in the right ways they can give you surprising powers of understanding. The purpose of this tutorial is to give you practice and guidance into the basic tricks of the trade so that when you are done you will be able to


Chaos Theory: A Brief Introduction

In 1963, Lorenz published a paper describing what he had discovered. He included the unpredictability of the weather, and discussed the types of equations that caused this type of behavior. Unfortunately, the only journal he was able to publish in was a meteorological journal, because he was a meteorologist, not a mathematician or a physicist. As a result, Lorenz’s discoveries weren’t acknowledged until years later, when they were rediscovered by others. Lorenz had discovered something revolutionary; now he had to wait for someone to discover him.

A short and well written history of chaos theory


Viruses of the Mind

The haven all memes depend on reaching is the human mind, but a human mind is itself an artifact created when memes restructure a human brain in order to make it a better habitat for memes. The avenues for entry and departure are modified to suit local conditions, and strengthened by various artificial devices that enhance fidelity and prolixity of replication: native Chinese minds differ dramatically from native French minds, and literate minds differ from illiterate minds. What memes provide in return to the organisms in which they reside is an incalculable store of advantages — with some Trojan horses thrown in for good measure.

Interesting essay describing the mechanics of spreading of viral ideas

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