The first two weeks of college are exceptional for a lot of reasons. But there's one phenomenon that stands out. It's as peculiar and as powerful and as rare as magic. [1] I'll call it "social annealing" because it so resembles the process by which metals are heated---their particles freed into a loose homogenous jumble---and […]
When I was planning my first long drive from school in Ann Arbor back home to New Jersey, I remember looking up directions on Google Maps and noticing, as in the results here, that it really doesn't take a lot of steps -- or driving maneuvers -- to get what seems to be a pretty […]
A commenter on Why The Law wondered whether we can "have a society whose output has equivalent K-complexity as ours, but is generated from simpler rules"—in effect seeking the simplest legal system that can sustain something like the U.S. economy. The idea reminded me of two papers—"Economic Production as Chemistry," by Padgett, Lee, and Collier […]
Yesterday a paper I was reading made reference to a "Galtonian composite photograph." From the context I had a vague idea of what the phrase referred to, but I wanted to learn more. So I: Googled "Galton" and clicked on the first result, the Wikipedia page for Sir Francis Galton. Searched the text there for […]
You can sort of let a novel run through you: the language is loose enough that you don't need to chew on sentences—you can swallow them whole, steadily one by one, and still have a perfectly clear picture of who everyone is and what's going on. Mathematics textbooks are different. If you churned through even […]