SCHOPENHAUER'S 38 STRATAGEMS, OR 38 WAYS TO WIN AN ARGUMENT Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), was a brilliant German philosopher. These 38 Stratagems are excerpts from "The Art of Controversy", first translated into English and published in 1896. Carry your opponent's proposition beyond its natural limits; exaggerate it. The more general your opponent's statement becomes, the more objections you can find against it. (abstracted from the book:Numerical Lists You Never Knew or Once Knew and Probably Forget, by: John Boswell and Dan Starer) Hydrocephalus and Intelligence: The Hollow Men · Gwern.net Hydrocephalus is a damaging brain disorder where fluids compress the brain, sometimes drastically decreasing its volume. While often extremely harmful or life-threatening when untreated, some people with severe compression nevertheless are relatively normal, and in one case (Lorber) they have been claimed to have IQs as high as 126 with a brain volume 5% of normal brains. An argument recently summarized by ex-biologist SF author argues that intelligence of human brains may have little to do with brain size variables such as neuron count, relying on an example of , a medical condition: For decades now, I have been haunted by the grainy, black-and-white x-ray of a human skull. What scared me was the fact that this virtually brain-free patient had an IQ of 126. Big if true. These claims however run into a lot of objections: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fake data. Suspiciously unverifiable anecdotes. Misleadingly described anecdotes. Hawks on Lorber Hawks concludes:
100 Amazing How-To Sites to Teach Yourself Anything | Rated Colleges Posted by Site Administrator in Online Learning May 7th, 2009 Learning new skills and expanding your knowledge doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg. There are loads of free resources on the Web that can help you find instructional videos, tutorials and classes to learn a wide variety of skills from fixing basic car problems to speaking another language. With 100 sites to choose from, you’re bound to find something here that will help you learn just about anything you could want. General Tutorials These sites offer a wide range of tutorials and videos. Around the House Want to know how to fix that broken cabinet or hang up some great wallpaper? Business and Management If you feel like you’re seriously lacking on business and management skills at work, no need to worry. KnowThis? Language and Writing Those who want to learn a new language, improve their writing skills or just learn more about literature will be well-served by these instructional sites. Technology Math S.O.S. Science Creativity
Neural Nets Are Overparameterized · Gwern.net Neural nets are extremely ‘overparameterized’ in the sense that they have orders of magnitude more parameters than necessary to solve the problems they are trained on, as can be proven by the regular improvements in training smaller/faster but still performant networks but also in directly creating smaller neural nets with similar or identical performance on those problems by deleting parameters (sparsification)/reducing precision of the numeric encoding (compressing)/training a much smaller network from scratch using the original large network somehow (distillation); mysteriously, these smaller networks typically cannot be trained from scratch; performance gains can be obtained without the original data; models can be trained to imitate themselves in self-distillation; despite this indicating overfitting ought to be a major concern, they generalize well; and many of these smaller networks are in some sense already present in the original neural network.
Excerpts from Brain Sex Men are different from women. They are equal only in their common membership of the same species, humankind. To maintain that they are the same in aptitude, skill or behaviour is to build a society based on a biological and scientific lie. The sexes are different because their brains are different. The brain, the chief administrative and emotional organ of life, is differently contructed in men and in women; it processes information in a different way, which results in different perceptions, priorities and behaviour. In the past ten years there has been an explosion of scientific research into what makes the sexes different.
The brainweb: Phase synchronization and large-scale integration | Nature Reviews Neuroscience 1Abeles, M. Local cortical circuits (Springer, Berlin, 1982). Google Scholar 2Palm, G. Engineering Education Offered Free by Top Colleges and Universities Getting Educated for Free 1. Computer and Software Engineering Courses Object Oriented Programming in C++ - Software engineering course from the University of Southern Queensland. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - Undergraduate course from MIT with a focus on computer engineering. Computer Architecture and Engineering - UC Berkeley computer engineering course. 2. Introduction to Electric Power Systems - Graduate level electrical engineering course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 3. Elements of Mechanical Design - Advanced mechanical engineering course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 4. Introduction to Civil Engineering Design - Civil engineering course from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Utilizing Your Engineering Education A bachelor's degree is almost always required to work in an engineering field. Free courses can be utilized to build a foundation of knowledge in different areas of engineering. Career and Salary Potential
Defecting or Not Defecting: How to “Read” Human Behavior during Cooperative Games by EEG Measurements Abstract Understanding the neural mechanisms responsible for human social interactions is difficult, since the brain activities of two or more individuals have to be examined simultaneously and correlated with the observed social patterns. We introduce the concept of hyper-brain network, a connectivity pattern representing at once the information flow among the cortical regions of a single brain as well as the relations among the areas of two distinct brains. Citation: De Vico Fallani F, Nicosia V, Sinatra R, Astolfi L, Cincotti F, Mattia D, et al. (2010) Defecting or Not Defecting: How to “Read” Human Behavior during Cooperative Games by EEG Measurements. Editor: Olaf Sporns, Indiana University, United States of America Received: July 13, 2010; Accepted: November 5, 2010; Published: December 1, 2010 Copyright: © 2010 De Vico Fallani et al. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Figure 1. Results Figure 2. Figure 3. Figure 4.
THE ABOLITION OF WORK by Bob Black No one should ever work. Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. You may be wondering if I'm joking or serious. The alternative to work isn't just idleness. I am not playing definitional games with anybody. Usually -- and this is even more true in "Communist" than capitalist countries, where the state is almost the only employer and everyone is an employee -- work is employment, i. e., wage-labor, which means selling yourself on the installment plan. But modern work has worse implications. The degradation which most workers experience on the job is the sum of assorted indignities which can be denominated as "discipline." Such is "work." I disagree.
the complementary nature book The Complementary Nature is a genuinely fascinating, provocative, and unique book. It rises to the challenge of describing how either/or thinking obscures the in-between dynamic realities that constitute life itself and in turn how these realities rest on complementary rather than oppositional pairs. In the process, it breaks new ground and opens fresh terrain for future research by illuminating ways in which the science of coordination dynamics—from the study of brains to the study of behavior—offers new paths for understanding the nature of human nature.Maxine Sheets-Johnstoneauthor of The Primacy of Movement To date, Bohr's generalized complementarity principle has been no more than an epistemological stance with little to say to the scientist expressing a normal interest in predicting natural phenomena.
Plant Alkaloids During the past 130 million years, flowering plants have colonized practically every habitat on earth, from arid deserts, boggy meadows and windswept alpine summits, to sun-baked grasslands, lush rain forests and wave-battered rocky shores. They have replaced most of the ancient ferns and seed plants that dinosaurs subsisted on, and developed a complex and fascinating relationship with insects and mammals. During these countless centuries of time, flowering plants have gradually evolved all sorts of ingenious protective devices to discourage hungry herbivorous animals. Leaves and stems have developed a variety of vicious spines and stinging hairs (trichomes). One of the largest groups of chemical arsenals produced by plants are the alkaloids. A Tree Protected By Ants Instead Of Alkaloids Thousands of different alkaloids have been discovered from throughout the plant kingdom, but there are some species that do not contain any of these bitter, nitrogenous compounds. The Deadly Datura
Mathematical Structure IIT.2020 1 Introduction Integrated Information Theory (IIT), developed by Giulio Tononi and collaborators [5, 45–47], has emerged as one of the leading scientific theories of consciousness. At the heart of the latest version of the theory [19, 25, 26, 31, 40] is an algorithm which, based on the level of integration of the internal functional relationships of a physical system in a given state, aims to determine both the quality and quantity (‘ value’) of its conscious experience. While promising in itself [12, 43], the mathematical formulation of the theory is not satisfying to date. The presentation in terms of examples and accompanying explanation veils the essential mathematical structure of the theory and impedes philosophical and scientific analysis. To resolve these problems, we examine the essentials of the IIT algorithm and formally define a generalized notion of Integrated Information Theory. FIGURE 1. Relation to Other Work 1.1 Structure of Article 2 Systems Definition 1. 1. FIGURE 2. 1.