Getting to Philosophy Clicking on the first link in the main text of a Wikipedia article, and then repeating the process for subsequent articles, usually eventually gets you to the Philosophy article. As of May 26, 2011, 94.52% of all articles in Wikipedia lead eventually to the article Philosophy. The remaining 100,000 (approx.) links to an article with no wikilinks or with links to pages that do not exist, or get stuck in loops (all three are equally probable).[1] The median link chain length to reach philosophy is 23. Crawl on Wikipedia from random article to Philosophy. There have been some theories on this phenomenon, with the most prevalent being the tendency for Wikipedia pages to move up a "classification chain." Applying the same steps to "Philosophy" itself and continuing onward, the user will return to "Philosophy" after 15 steps. Origins[edit] Following the chain consists of: See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]
User:Ilmari Karonen/First link An internet meme, originally discovered by a user of Reddit.com named pixelcrak [1] on April 13, 2011 and further popularized by xkcd [2], says that if you go to a random article on Wikipedia and keep clicking the first non-parenthesized link in the body text of each article you get, you'll always eventually end up at Philosophy. But is this really true? Or, rather, what is the probability of that actually happening? Having extracted the links (which took a while), I computed the limit cycles of the resulting iterated map and their basin sizes, i.e. the number of articles (excluding redirects) from which the iteration converged to each cycle. To summarize, the meme is indeed quite accurate: starting from a random Wikipedia article, the probability of ending up at the cycle which includes Philosophy is almost 95%.
All Roads Lead to “Philosophy” All Roads Lead to “Philosophy” There was an idea floating around that continuously following the first link of any Wikipedia article will eventually lead to “Philosophy.” 1 This sounded like a reasonable assertion, one that makes a certain amount of sense in retrospect: any description of something will typically use more general terms. Following that idea will eventually lead… somewhere. It also sounded like an idea that would be easily examinable with basic client-side scripting tools, using the Wikipedia API and a good graphing package. I still have a lot of tweaking to do but the results so far are pretty nice. Multiple titles can be added using a comma-separated list. There are some circumstances where a loop is detected up the chain. 1 See the tooltip by hovering over the cartoon at xkcd which is said to be the source of this observation.
Heterotopia (space) Heterotopia is a concept in human geography elaborated by philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are spaces of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you see yourself in the mirror. A utopia is an idea or an image that is not real but represents a perfected version of society, such as Thomas More’s book or Le Corbusier’s drawings. Foucault uses the idea of a mirror as a metaphor for the duality and contradictions, the reality and the unreality of utopian projects. Foucault articulates several possible types of heterotopia or spaces that exhibit dual meanings: A ‘crisis heterotopia’ is a separate space like a boarding school or a motel room where activities like coming of age or a honeymoon take place out of sight.
The 50 most interesting articles on Wikipedia « Copybot Deep in the bowels of the internet, I came across an exhaustive list of interesting Wikipedia articles by Ray Cadaster. It’s brilliant reading when you’re bored, so I got his permission to post the top 50 here. Bookmark it, start reading, and become that person who’s always full of fascinating stuff you never knew about. The top 50 Wikipedia articles by interestingness 1. *Copybot is not responsible for the hours and hours that disappeared while you were exploring this list. Edit: If you enjoyed this list, I’ve since posted 50 more of Wikipedia’s most interesting articles. Like this: Like Loading... Related Picking flicks About six months ago, it dawned on me that whenever someone asked me if I'd seen a particular film, my answer was almost invariably no. In "Copybot articles"
The Able Slave Suppose there are ten people on a desert island. One, named Able Abel, is extremely able. With a hard day's work, Able can produce enough to feed all ten people on the island. Eight islanders are marginally able. With a hard day's work, each can produce enough to feed one person. Questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. How would most people answer these questions? Yet bleeding-heart libertarian Jason Brennan doesn't seem conflicted. Imagine that your empirical beliefs about economics have been disconfirmed. In a followup, Brennan adds: If you are a hard libertarian, you respond to this thought experiment by saying, "Well, that's too bad things turned out that way. This is a good example of what puzzles me most about bleeding-heart libertarians: At times, they sound less libertarian than the typical non-libertarian.* I'm not claiming that the "hard libertarian" intuition is certainly true. Needless to say, bleeding-heart libertarians usually sound a lot more libertarian than the typical non-libertarian.
The Cabinet of Invisible Counselors Have you ever had a discussion with someone who posed this question: “If you could invite any five people, living or dead, to dinner, who would they be?” It’s an interesting question to consider, but one that doesn’t have to remain strictly a hypothetical. Now, of course you can’t drag the bones of history’s greatest corpses to your table (“Oh dear, Teddy’s hand just fell off into his soup. I believe that every man should create his own personal “Cabinet of Invisible Counselors”–a sort of imaginary team of mentors whom he can consult for advice and inspiration throughout his life. Napoleon Hill’s Invisible Counselors As we discussed in our post about famous Master Mind groups, success guru Napoleon Hill believed that when two of more people met together and blended the energies of their minds in harmony, a sort of “third brain” was formed–a potent “Master Mind” the whole group had access to. Why Create Your Own Cabinet of Invisible Counselors “Nurture your minds with great thoughts. 1. 2.
The Political Compass Morality Quiz/Test your Morals, Values & Ethics - Your Morals.Org Russell's teapot Russell's teapot, sometimes called the celestial teapot or cosmic teapot, is an analogy first coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making scientifically unfalsifiable claims rather than shifting the burden of proof to others, specifically in the case of religion. Russell wrote that if he claims that a teapot orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, it is nonsensical for him to expect others to believe him on the grounds that they cannot prove him wrong. Russell's teapot is still referred to in discussions concerning the existence of God. Origins of the analogy[edit] In an article titled "Is There a God?" In 1958, Russell elaborated on the analogy as a reason for his own atheism: I ought to call myself an agnostic; but, for all practical purposes, I am an atheist. The burden of proof argument[edit] Other thinkers have posited similar analogies. Analysis[edit] Objections[edit]
Personal and Historical Perspectives of Hans Bethe Constructor Theory | Conversation | Edge I'm speaking to you now: Information starts as some kind of electrochemical signals in my brain, and then it gets converted into other signals in my nerves and then into sound waves and then into the vibrations of a microphone, mechanical vibrations, then into electricity and so on, and presumably will eventually go on the Internet. This something has been instantiated in radically different physical objects that obey different laws of physics. Yet in order to describe this process you have to refer to the thing that has remained unchanged throughout the process, which is only the information rather than any obviously physical thing like energy or momentum. The way to get this substrate independence of information is to refer it to a level of physics that is below and more fundamental than things like laws of motion, that we have been used thinking of as near the lowest, most fundamental level of physics. Being testable is not as simple a concept as it sounds. This is counterintuitive.
Sokal affair The resultant academic and public quarrels concerned the scholarly merit of humanistic commentary about the physical sciences; the influence of postmodern philosophy on social disciplines in general; academic ethics, including whether Sokal was wrong to deceive the editors and readers of Social Text; and whether the journal had exercised appropriate intellectual rigor before publishing the pseudoscientific article. Background[edit] In an interview on the NPR program All Things Considered, Sokal said he was inspired to submit the hoax article after reading Higher Superstition (1994), by Paul R. Gross and Norman Levitt. After analyzing essays from "the academic Left", scientists argued that some of these critical writers were ignorant of the original scientific documents they were criticizing and, therefore, were making a series of nonsensical statements about the nature and intent of science. The article[edit] Content of the article[edit] Publication[edit] Peer review[edit] Responses[edit]