brainrow

While we’re on the subject of flow charts, here’s one, via Boing Boing, from WellingtonGrey.net: W.W.G.W.B.D.?

Now we can understand how the Decider decides.

I’m an old-fashioned guy. I don’t have a cell phone, so I don’t need a customized ring tone.

This blog, however, is thoroughly cutting-edge. So when I heard about these eight distinctive short MP3s, I thought, “Oh, the young kids today, they love this stuff. They can use it for their ringy-dingy thingys.” From Wired.com:

Last year, Americans spent an estimated $600 million on ringtones, thanks to the popularity of realtones — those 10- to 30-second snippets of popular songs. But with tinny sound and abrupt edits, they’re a sorry substitute for the real thing. Now preeminent indie rockers They Might Be Giants have embraced the ringtone as a stand-alone medium. The Brooklyn-based band, which was an early short-form innovator with “Dial-a-Song” – an answering machine that played a different tune each day for callers – has started composing original songlettes as an alternative to the canned loop. “We take a little sketch of a lyric or idea and make it as intense as possible,” says singer-songwriter John Flansburgh. “These songs are built for repeated listens.” To prove it, TMBG composed several original “snacktones” just for Wired readers.

They’re free downloads.

From Dr. Charles, The Cure for Loneliness.

One of my most-awaited TV series is finally being released on DVD: WKRP in Cincinnati.

According to Amazon.com, the first season will be released on April 24. I’m ready!

In two blog entries (one and two) Dr. Janet D. Stemwedel discusses the difference between scientific and non-scientific thinking.

First, here’s the process that no one thinks is a good description of how to come to a scientific conclusion:

Believing something doesn’t make it so. Science is an endeavor that is not concerned with what a person believes about the world but instead with what one can establish about the world, usually on the basis of empirical evidence.

The second drawing is based on the late Sir Karl Popper’s philosophy of science.

Popper didn’t see the problem of induction — that inductive inferences drawn from limited data could go wrong — as something that could be “solved”. However, he thought that the methodology of science avoided the problem by not identifying conclusions arrived at through inductive inference as “knowledge” in the strong sense of “there is no way this could fail to be true”. Here’s Popper’s picture of the process of building scientific knowledge:

Notice that Popper doesn’t think it matters all that much where your hypothesis P comes from. Maybe it comes from lots of poking around and observing your phenomena. Maybe it comes from that recurring nightmare of the snake biting his own tail. It’s not important. The thing that can make P a respectable scientific claim is that it is tested in the right kind of way.

In an earlier discussion of Popper, Stemwedel wrote:

The big difference Popper identifies between science and pseudo-science is a difference in attitude. While a pseudo-science is set up to look for evidence that supports its claims, Popper says, a science is set up to challenge its claims and look for evidence that might prove it false. In other words, pseudo-science seeks confirmations and science seeks falsifications.

No wonder some politicians are at war with science. A big bag of hot air might not carry you very high if you keep looking for ways to poke holes in it.