My brother pointed this out to me yesterday and it got me rather excited. Now first of all, for all of you outside the UK, this may be hard to understand. You may even think I’ve lost it. “Plugs? He thinks plugs are going to save the world?” But bear with me… The reason this excited me – apart from the sheer elegance of Min-Kyu Choi’s design – was because it took me completely by …
From ancient times man has dreamed of being able to give life to one of his creations. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus (Daedalus as well, I think?) constructed ‘robots’ (Talos, for example, Hephaestus’ gigantic bronze warrior of “Jason and the Argonauts” fame). It was not understood then how intelligence was going to be far more difficult to produce artificially than self-powered movement. When I was at school, there was much talk about chess playing computers and …
Nothing is certain, nor should we expect it to be. What can we know about China (for example)? For me, it’s far away. I’ve visited China – but only Hong Kong and Macao. I’ve read about China, but only a couple of dozen books. I have studied T’ai Chi, but only for 10 years, and only one form of it, and dabbled in some others. I have eaten Chinese food and cook it myself. I …
Here is a link to an excellent article in the Guardian that sets the stage for the drama that Copenhagen might turn out to be… I’m sure you’re as concerned as I am about the threat to our planet from global warming. I can’t say that I have great hopes for the meeting that is opening today at Copenhagen to come up with any definitive progress. However, I have become heartened by the way this …
My brother has a concept of ‘personal gravity’ that he uses to describe a quality that a person demonstrates towards others. Specifically, he has used it as a stick to beat me with: complaining that I have such strong ‘personal gravity’ that I never “leave my own planet to go and visit other people’s” (ie. his)… I think that this concept can be generalized to some advantage. Gravity – in the sense that Einstein defined …
Here’s another of those wonderful graphics (discussed in a previous post). It instantly makes many things clear. Not least how responsible we are in the West – the US and Europe in particular – for the predicament we find ourselves in. Also how little China and India and Brazil, the new ‘bad boys’, are responsible. And most crucially, how little time there is… Then, when you combine it with this other graphic… noting especially the …
The graphic above (courtesy of my friend Keith Brunton) is considered by some to be possibly the best statistical graphic ever drawn. By Charles Joseph Minard (1781 – 1870), a French engineer, it shows the terrible fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia. Quoting from “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R. Tufte: “Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of …
I have an abiding distrust – dislike, even – of certainty. If there is one thing I have learned about life it is that we can not really be certain of anything much at all. Thus, it seems to me that when a human pronounces that he/she is absolutely certain of something, what they are expressing is a belief that feels to them to be necessary to their psychological wellbeing… It is, of course, uncomfortable …
It occurs to me that the moves in chess have interesting parallels to human thought and even to our lives… A rook represents an orthogonal approach – powerful and direct – but inflexible. A bishop has – literally – an oblique approach, with an ability to slice forensically past seemingly solid opposition. A pawn’s slow, forward plodding – with its frail hope of, in the end, overcoming almost insurmountable odds and reaching that butterfly like …
my nephew’s stonedance tattoo…
