Decoding Chinese Form. Home The Hidden Meanings Behind The Flash The King, the Fool, and the Fox Reading and controlling non-verbal communication in the sparring ring Do you know what you're really learning? Balance and the Martial Arts Learn the deadly combination of strategy and attitude Two Man Staff Drills from China Spinning Staff Techniques How to Do a Pole Vaulting Side Kick Stefan Traces The Origins of Kung Fu to Thailand's Mountain Tribes No nonsense advice on what works in real life. Books A Case Study of Sensory Enhancement for the Blind and Vision Impaired Decoding Chinese Forms By Stefan Verstappen Originally published in Black Belt Magazine Sept .05 Chinese styles are often criticized as being impractical, showy and lacking in practical application.
Chinese forms are some of the most complicated and confusing because they contain hidden meanings that, like a puzzle, can only be solved by persistent study. Symbolic Gestures Forms occasionally include movements that are symbolic of the style. Be lucky - it's an easy skill to learn. Take the case of chance opportunities. Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities, whereas unlucky people do not. I carried out a simple experiment to discover whether this was due to differences in their ability to spot such opportunities.
I gave both lucky and unlucky people a newspaper, and asked them to look through it and tell me how many photographs were inside. On average, the unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs, whereas the lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because the second page of the newspaper contained the message: "Stop counting. For fun, I placed a second large message halfway through the newspaper: "Stop counting. Personality tests revealed that unlucky people are generally much more tense than lucky people, and research has shown that anxiety disrupts people's ability to notice the unexpected. And so it is with luck - unlucky people miss chance opportunities because they are too focused on looking for something else.
Table of Contents. Manifesto for Agile Software Development. You and Your Research. Transcription of the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Seminar 7 March 1986 J. F. Kaiser Bell Communications Research 445 South Street Morristown, NJ 07962-1910 jfk@bellcore.com At a seminar in the Bell Communications Research Colloquia Series, Dr.
Richard W. In order to make the information in the talk more widely available, the tape recording that was made of that talk was carefully transcribed. As a speaker in the Bell Communications Research Colloquium Series, Dr. Alan G. Dick is one of the all time greats in the mathematics and computer science arenas, as I'm sure the audience here does not need reminding. While our professional paths have not been very close over the years, nevertheless I've always recognized Dick in the halls of Bell Labs and have always had tremendous admiration for what he was doing.
I think I last met him - it must have been about ten years ago - at a rather curious little conference in Dublin, Ireland where we were both speakers. Jennifer Burns on the surprising popularity of a libertarian her. Consumer spending in the United States may be down, but an interest in Ayn Rand certainly is not. Sales of Rand's last novel, the vigorously pro-capitalism fable Atlas Shrugged, have seen a huge leap in 2009, briefly outperforming even President Barack Obama's The Audacity of Hope on Amazon's best-seller list.
Few 1,000-page, half-century-old tomes can claim so much. At tea parties and town halls nationwide, amid outrage over government bailouts of Wall Street banks and Detroit carmakers and the supposed socialization of health care, protesters speak of "going Galt," refusing to work in what they see as a socialist economy, just as Rand's hero John Galt did. Even the mea culpa of Rand's most famous fan and follower, former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, has done little to dent the appeal of her radical individualism and libertarianism, which Rand shaped into a philosophy she called Objectivism. The Universal Law of Leverage. Saturday, October 10, 2008 Statistics suggest that most successful startup founders have three failures under their belt before they make it big.
It doesn't have to be that way. While nothing can replace hard-earned experience, people can and do learn from other people's mistakes. I'm a firm believer that a couple of simple (in hindsight) lessons can significantly increase the overall success rate. In this article I want to talk about leverage. I think that in at least half the failures I've seen (my own as well as others), misunderstanding the mechanics of leverage played a key part. The probability of you getting leverage in a given situation is inversely proportional to how much you need it. This isn't a philosophical statement at all. The inverse of this also tends to be true. This is a fairly simple concept, and yet, every day people start companies with business plans that depend on cooperation of key suppliers, or outside funding, or a chain of other highly unlikely events.
Philosophy since the Enlightenment, by Roger Jones. How to Do Philosophy. September 2007 In high school I decided I was going to study philosophy in college. I had several motives, some more honorable than others. One of the less honorable was to shock people. College was regarded as job training where I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. Sort of like slashing holes in your clothes or putting a safety pin through your ear, which were other forms of impressive impracticality then just coming into fashion. But I had some more honest motives as well. I'd tried to read a few philosophy books.
The summer before senior year I took some college classes. Twenty-six years later, I still don't understand Berkeley. The difference between then and now is that now I understand why Berkeley is probably not worth trying to understand. Words I did end up being a philosophy major for most of college. Formal logic has some subject matter. There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. How did things get this way? History. Overcoming Bias: "Science" as Curiosity-Stopper. Followup to: Semantic Stopsigns, Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, Say Not 'Complexity' Imagine that I, in full view of live television cameras, raised my hands and chanted abracadabra and caused a brilliant light to be born, flaring in empty space beyond my outstretched hands.
Imagine that I committed this act of blatant, unmistakeable sorcery under the full supervision of James Randi and all skeptical armies. Most people, I think, would be fairly curious as to what was going on. But now suppose instead that I don't go on television. I do not wish to share the power, nor the truth behind it. I want to keep my sorcery secret. Yes indeed! It's not a real explanation, so much as a curiosity-stopper. Better yet, the same trick works with a standard light switch. Flip a switch and a light bulb turns on. In school, one is taught that the password to the light bulb is "Electricity! " But what does the phrase "scientifically explicable" mean? "What the heck? " Overcoming Bias: Scientific Evidence, Legal Evidence, Rational E. Suppose that your good friend, the police commissioner, tells you in strictest confidence that the crime kingpin of your city is Wulky Wilkinsen.
As a rationalist, are you licensed to believe this statement? Put it this way: if you go ahead and mess around with Wulky's teenage daughter, I'd call you foolhardy. Since it is prudent to act as if Wulky has a substantially higher-than-default probability of being a crime boss, the police commissioner's statement must have been strong Bayesian evidence. Our legal system will not imprison Wulky on the basis of the police commissioner's statement. It is not admissible as legal evidence. Maybe if you locked up every person accused of being a crime boss by a police commissioner, you'd initially catch a lot of crime bosses, plus some people that a police commissioner didn't like.
This does not mean that the police commissioner's statement is not rational evidence. Like a court system, science as a social process is made up of fallible humans. Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Voice of humanity: True Religion Creates Community. Big_religion_chart.htm. Squashed Philosophers- Condensed Plato Ari. Logical Fallacies and How to Spot Them. Logical Fallacies and How to Spot Them In the Evolution vs. Creationism debate, it is important to be able to spot all the logical fallacies that Creationists tend to throw around.
This essay covers many bare essentials of logical thinking, as well as ways to critically evaluate an argument. The logical fallacies listed here are the ones most often used by Creationists, although Creationists have, to date, used almost every single logical fallacy in existence to "prove" their case. THE STRAWMAN ATTACK: The strawman is, perhaps, the most heavily-employed tactic used by Creationists. "Evolution is a ridiculous theory! This is an example of a strawman attack. Spotting a strawman attack isn't that hard. Strawman attacks, once exposed for what they are, are not all that difficult to counter. THE FALSE DILEMMA FALLACY: The false dilemma is at the heart of the Creationist argument.
If you look carefully, you'll also notice the strawman attack. "Isaac Newton was a believer in Creation. Gaia theory (science) - Wikipedia, the fre. The study of planetary habitability is partly based upon extrapolation from knowledge of the Earth's conditions, as the Earth is the only planet currently known to harbour life The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.
Topics of interest include how the biosphere and the evolution of life forms affect the stability of global temperature, ocean salinity, oxygen in the atmosphere and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth. Introduction[edit] Less accepted versions of the hypothesis claim that changes in the biosphere are brought about through the coordination of living organisms and maintain those conditions through homeostasis. In some versions of Gaia philosophy, all lifeforms are considered part of one single living planetary being called Gaia. Zen Koans - AshidaKim.com. Buddhism/eightfoldpath.html.
Mind &Life Institute. Essentials of Buddhism - core concept.