March 2012
7 posts
How We Know →
Freeman Dyson on science and information:
Jimmy Wales hoped when he started Wikipedia that the combination of enthusiastic volunteer writers with open source information technology would cause a revolution in human access to knowledge. The rate of growth of Wikipedia exceeded his wildest dreams. Within ten years it has become the biggest storehouse of information on the planet and the noisiest...
Fractal Dimensions
How long is the coast of Britain? The answer, surprisingly, depends on the size of your ruler. If you measure with a big stick, you will only pick up the rough features, but if you measure with a smaller one, your route will be longer. In 1967, Benoît B. Mandelbrot wrote a paper called How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. In it, he contends that,...
Not Explaining a Visual Illusion
This is the Hermann grid illusion. It’s a very well-known and simple optical illusion. When you look at the intersections of the white lines, you see illusory dark blobs.
The standard explanation for this has to do with retinal ganglion cells. These cells pool information from several rod and cone cells in the retina and transmit it to the brain. The area each ganglion cell collects...
