Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

This is great science news, something for all my friends named Bruce and their sheilas to enjoy. Scientists say that Australia's tectonic plate is the world's fastest. As a consequence, mapping positions based on Australia's position in 1994 are now wrong by 1.5 meters, because everything Down Under is now further north than it was 22 years ago. This may require some revision of what is meant by expressions like "geological time."  Here's Reuters' report: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-maps-idUSKCN10C1GM No wonder Bindi was such a good dancer on DWTS. Her whole bloomin' continent can dance!

  Last week our discussion took us as far as to a description of the normal or Bell curve. See a depiction above. The numbers at the bottom of the graph refer to “standard deviations” from the norm. We were discussing specifically mileage errors on maps. One standard deviation from the mean (the area between -1 and +1 on our graph above) accounts for roughly 68 percent of all the maps in our hypothetical database. Two standard deviations from the mean (the area between -2 and +2) account for roughly 95 percent of the maps. Three standard deviations account for 99 percent. A normal curve for a phenomenon is taken as evidence of randomness. If there were some reason why the mapmakers of 17 th century England were inclined to make a particular error that reason would show up as some non-normality in this chart. Perhaps the roads between these two places were especially good by the standard of the day, and the ease of travel created a general impression that the cities were...

I said in an entry last week that a downgrade from Morgan Stanley was a reasonable candidate for the cause of a downward stock price move, as we intuitively understand the idea of cause. But proving this would be a trickier matter. It would require showing that there was nothing else happening that evening or morning that may also have had consequences for that demand. Or, if there were other things happening, if would require some measure by which we could distinguish this causation candidate as more potent that the others. Even if it is a very general rule that similar announcement proceeds stock price fall, other explanations are possible. After all, since we’re assuming that Morgan Stanley’s analyst was working from publicly available information, we could hypothesize that a lot of traders and in-house buy-side analysts reached the same conclusion at the same time Joe Smith did and would have reached it even if Joe Smith had had nothing to say, or had through some analy...

I've been writing here of late about the disappointment I felt upon reading Hilton Ratcliffe's book, The Static Universe. Not only does it fail to make much of a case against the Big Bang Theory, but it tries to do so at the expense of all of modern geometry, going back to the great Gauss himself. The key line of argument comes late, in chapter 8. One might say Ratcliffe has buried his lede although, this being his lede, it may be natural to try to bury it. In chapter 8, after praise for Gauss' simple life, teaching skills, and generous spirit, we learn that he had one weakness, an "obsession with the abstract." That would seem to be a job requirement for a geometer, but by calling it an "obsession" Ratcliffe has established to his own satisfaction that it is a weakness. After working on global cartography, Ratcliffe tells us, Gauss succumbed to his eagerness to abstract and "presented his scientific progeny the gift of Differential ...