The dimension of the configuration space is the smallest number of parameters that have to be given to completely specify a configuration. The dimension of the configuration space is also called the number of degrees of freedom of the system.4

The parameters used to specify the configuration of the system are called the generalized coordinates.

f. The same as e, but not axisymmetric.

e. A top consisting of a rigid axisymmetric body with one point on the symmetry axis of the body attached to a fixed support, subject to a uniform gravitational force.

d. A point mass sliding without friction on a rigid curved wire.

c. A spherical double pendulum, consisting of one point mass hanging from a rigid massless rod attached to a second point mass hanging from a second massless rod attached to a fixed support point. The point masses are subject to the uniform force of gravity.

b. A spherical pendulum, consisting of a point mass (the pendulum bob) hanging from a rigid massless rod attached to a fixed support point. The pendulum bob may move in any direction subject to the constraint imposed by the rigid rod. The point mass is subject to the uniform force of gravity.

a. Three juggling pins.

Certainly we are not our name. However, we are not our appellations either – because, as we have seen, appellations can and do become names. We are, rather, our past, present and future – our experiences, attitudes, and aspirations – our deeds, beliefs, and dreams. We are the memories in other people’s minds.

Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved.

Nomenclature plays a very important part in nationalist thought.

If the chosen unit is an actual country, such as Ireland or India, he will generally claim superiority for it not only in military power and political virtue, but in art, literature, sport, structure of the language, the physical beauty of the inhabitants, and perhaps even in climate, scenery and cooking.

Obviously there are considerable resemblances between political Catholicism, as exemplified by Chesterton, and Communism.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also – since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself – unshakeably certain of being in the right.

but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.

Yet the obvious irony of Montessori’s crusade on behalf of the poorest and least powerful in society is that its most visible legacy is selective private schools for the élite.

it is the liberals who fear liberty and the intellectuals who want to do dirt on the intellect:

If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

But where had these people learned this essentially totalitarian outlook? Pretty certainly they had learned it from the Communists themselves! Tolerance and decency are deeply rooted in England, but they are not indestructible, and they have to be kept alive partly by conscious effort. The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.

The most ardent Russophile hardly believed that all of the victims were guilty of all the things they were accused of: but by holding heretical opinions they ‘objectively’ harmed the régime, and therefore it was quite right not only to massacre them but to discredit them by false accusations.

In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

The ordinary people in the street-partly, perhaps, because they are not sufficiently interested in ideas to be intolerant about them-still vaguely hold that ‘I suppose everyone’s got a right to their own opinion.’ It is only, or at any rate it is chiefly, the literary and scientific intelligentsia, the very people who ought to be the guardians of liberty, who are beginning to despise it, in theory as well as in practice.

and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in me Ukraine.

Stalin is sacrosanct and certain aspects of his policy must not be seriously discussed.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

Obviously it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in war time) over books which are not officially sponsored.

Intelligence is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for happiness, kindness, self-worth, or worldly success—in fact, when one’s relationship to it is unhealthy, as mine has often been, it can be detrimental to all of these.

The only value intelligence has is in the pleasures it offers: the ability to become totally absorbed in the world and to be completely transported from it. Intelligence does not give life meaning; without a healthy relationship to it, as Wittgenstein could tell you, it is nothing but a curse.

Euthyphro dilemma: you find most things your child does lovable precisely because it is your child doing them.

In other words, what we call language is not a system by which propositions picture the world, but a loose network of games.

elides

imperfect pragmatism over useless perfectionism

Explanations come to an end somewhere.

But spelling is an entirely conventional activity. It gives standardized visual form to spoken language.

“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

Teachers always learn more from their students than their students learn from them,

He did not suffer fools gladly, and he considered almost everyone a fool.

sub specie aeternitatis

A baby grows to adult size, after which growth goes to maintaining stability, homeostasis, balance. Growth much beyond that leads to obesity. For a baby to grow endlessly bigger would be first monstrous, then fatal.

The act of creation causes imagination, not the other way around.

It compels us to understand that not every acceleration results from a universal force and this is the essential idea of the first law.

agents

Ideology isn’t the driver of our lived experiences, but the product of them. Our ideological commitment to work is the result of incessant and repeated activity – literally doing our jobs day in and day out.

As the woman who presented the “show” noted, after cautioning everyone in the room to turn off their cell phones, this gender neutral look was appropriate, as the robot was supposed to approximate Avalokiteśvara, a Bodhisattva who can appear as male or female (or even an animal or something inanimate) depending on the viewer and who can travel through time and space. 

Society as a whole has made a four-year university degree a necessary condition for dignified work and a decent life. This is a mistake. Those of us in higher education can easily forget that most Americans do not have a four-year college degree. Nearly two-thirds do not.

We have cast universities as the arbiters of opportunity. We have assigned them the role of allocating credentials and defining the merit that the wider society rewards — economically, but also in terms of honor, recognition, and prestige. ADVERTISEMENT Being cast in this role has enlarged the economic and cultural importance of universities. But we’ve paid a price for it. For one thing, support for higher education has become a partisan matter.

a mass that could only be primordial

Black holes can form even in the absence of any matter, from large enough distortions of spacetime that curl up into a singularity.

It’s important to pay attention to who decides which phenomena to study, which research earns major government grants, which big experiments get funded, who gets speaking opportunities at scientific conferences, who is media savvy, who wins prominent fellowships and awards, and who gets promoted to high-profile faculty positions. Different choices sometimes can shape the future trajectory of science. And when choices by theorists and experimentalists coincide symbiotically, Pickering argues, it can be challenging for an upstart theory – such as modified gravity – to get a fair hearing.

Words have power. Numbers help to persuade.

Illustrations of the natural world in regions inaccessible to observers need to be understood on their own terms: not as decoration or fantasy, but as information that is assembled as – and functions as – a diagram.

Our initial emotional responses to woodcuts of marine animals don’t constitute evidence-based analysis: they are value judgments based on responses to stylistic and diagramming conventions from another era.

Species don’t come into being when they’re published in a scientific journal. But publication is when they come into being as a scientific object.

Scientists don’t have a special reason to moan; in fact, it’s really quite remarkable how many people are interested in subjects as blazingly irrelevant to practical life as dinosaurs, the Higgs boson and cosmology.

In other words, the mental representation itself is just another item whose significance bears explaining.

The mental representation view of concepts is the default position in cognitive science

There’s something else that the Space Age did for our civilization: it unified the sciences in a way that was actually necessary. Because it wasn’t until Sputnik and the space missions that followed that the wall between the scientific disciplines came down.

The continents and seas and isles on this map were not those of the world I knew; and their names were written in heteroclitic runes of a lost alphabet.

There was a spell of perpetual quietude upon the air, and never the slightest rippling of leaves or water; and the whole landscape hung before me like a monstrous vision of unbelievable realms apart from time and space.

When analysing people, numbers present an illusion of precision and accuracy. 

a download does not translate to a lost sale.

I do not pretend that uploading or downloading unpurchased electronic books is morally correct, but I do think it is more of a grey area than some of your readers may.

But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands.

The two graphs were completely different, implying that to ignore the extreme cases is to ignore reality. "I'm extremely visual," Mandelbrot said. "Often the pictures suggest the deeper truth underlying the formulas."

internalize the norms of this institution and expect the wider society to operate in accordance with these norms;

the more its female intellectuals will exhibit the same disproportionate anti-capitalism its male intellectuals show.

the society seems to announce that

If you were designing a society, you would not seek to design it so that the wordsmiths, with all their influence, were schooled into animus against the norms of the society.

the norms within schools will affect the normative beliefs of people after they leave the schools.

For distribution in a centrally planned socialist society stands to distribution in a capitalist society as distribution by the teacher stands to distribution by the schoolyard and hallway.

deemed that philosophers should rule

Indeed, there need not be any pattern of distribution a society is aiming to achieve, even a society concerned with justice.

If the experience of the English is typical, heavy tea-drinking will produce English moral philosophy, a tendency toward a pale complexion, hypocrisy and backbiting.

This coffee falls into your stomach,

Connoisseurs pursue coffee drinking the way they pursue all their passions; they proceed by increments, and, like Nicolet, move from strong to stronger stuff, until consumption becomes abuse.

Many people claim coffee inspires them; but as everybody likewise knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring.

The miracle of the finite but universal library is a mere inflation of the miracle of binary notation: everything worth saying, and everything else as well, can be said with two characters.

Numbers are cheap.

The view from the parapet was vertiginous, but in time one gets used to anything.

The point of poetry is, in a sense, to reveal the deep twining of language and meaning. At least it was for Brodsky (when I audited his poetry seminar in Ann Arbor). To really register this power takes time.

using the right (not as opposed to left, but as opposed to wrong) part of our brains to do so.

In general, cronopios are depicted as naive and idealistic, disorganised, unconventional and sensitive creatures, who stand in contrast or opposition to famas (who are rigid, organised and judgmental if well-intentioned) and esperanzas (who are plain, indolent, unimaginative and dull).

In my experience, especially now that we are fully enrolled in the digital way of things, most of the day’s reading is a grasshoppering from here to there, and sometimes back again.

missionary position’ of reading. A book or text is engaged from its beginning and tracked through to conclusion, chapters being the mile-markers.

‘I photograph to see what things look like photographed.

When I like how something looks, I take a photograph.

But even more chilling is her observation that her own face looks at her. She does not see herself.

Wisdom, said William James,Is learning what to overlook. And I am wiseIf that is wisdom.

No, there’s always a large measure of serendipity in the mix. Where are you reading? When? What time of day, or night? Who is with you? What are you drinking? Most importantly, what are you thinking, what are you going through? Why are you reading?

I can’t remember a word of it, a sentence of it. A whiff of Paris, of young people, of jazz. But I remember it.

the war photographer taking images of suffering and death without stepping into the fray

The Creative Process (1985), edited by Brewster Ghiselin.

A zero-percent body fat person may be in either a low or high quality body state depending on whether they are starving in the desert, or an athlete in training, with a well-stocked fridge.

High-fat, high-excellence is high quality.

Fatness is embodied abundance. Or if you like clever lines: Fatness is future-fitness.

Excellence is synonymous with quality only under behavioral regimes governed by an optimizing sensibility, operating on a closed and bounded notion of what the kids these days seem to be calling fitness-to-purpose.

When important events take place now, commercial news outlets instantly slice up the facts and commoditize them for consumption by their respective political demographics. We always had this process, to some degree, but it no longer takes days to sift into the op-ed pages.

Went was so often willing to consider what most scientists dismissed, and this permitted him to pioneer new fields of inquiry, rather than to move into fields opened up by others.

He also believed that photosynthesis does not control plant growth; rather, plant growth controls photosynthesis.

“I may be right, I may even know that I am right, but I am never sufficiently ruthless and effective to force other people to believe that I am right and to act accordingly. All this was so unnecessary: it all could have been avoided if people had not thought that my objections were just theoretical and statistical and that they were practical people and need pay no attention to them.”

“The butterfly, in effect, was therefore ‘invented’ by the bat,” she wrote.

But about 98 million years ago, some of them became active in the day, and gave rise to the butterflies—a group that Barber wryly describes as “an uninteresting diurnal group of moths.”

Even more fundamentally, indigenous people were just too different: Their skin was dark. Their languages were foreign. And their world views and spiritual beliefs were beyond most white men’s comprehension. To settlers fearful that a loved one might become the next Mary Campbell, all this stoked racial hatred and paranoia, making it easy to paint indigenous peoples as pagan savages who must be killed in the name of civilization and Christianity.

The essential point is that genes are IFs rather than MUSTs.

at heart they are merely specializations on a universal cellular theme.

animal breeders know that shaping the bodies of animals often leads to correlated changes in behavior

he brain’s capabilities, like those of other organs, emerge from its physical properties.

brain is drastically different from other physical systems

Yet 2,000 years of thinking of the mind as independent from the body kept people from appreciating the significance of this seemingly obvious point.

preformationism

It is certainly true that the number of genes is tiny in comparison to the number of neurons, and that the developing brain is highly plastic. Nevertheless, nature—in the form of genes—has an enormous impact on the developing brain and mind.

Although teacher quality certainly matters, most of the variance in student achievement is associated with factors outside the classroom.

. The highly publicized "pay gap" that dominates news headlines is the product of a simplistic methodology that, when universally applied, suggests that nurses, firefighters, and other professionals are dramatically overpaid.

Never say that you’ll give a talk unless you know clearly what you’re going to talk about and more or less what you’re going to say.

It is very dangerous to have such a policy in teaching—to teach students only how to get certain results, rather than how to do an experiment with scientific integrity.

Next time they try it they don’t get it any more.  And now you find a man saying that it is an irrelevant demand to expect a repeatable experiment.  This is science?

In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats

because there wouldn’t be any new result.

it seems to have been the general policy then to not try to repeat psychological experiments, but only to change the conditions and see what happens.

If your answer happens to come out in the direction the government or the politicians like, they can use it as an argument in their favor; if it comes out the other way, they don’t publish it at all. 

If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing—and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.

We’ve learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don’t have that kind of a disease.

Other experimenters will repeat your experiment and find out whether you were wrong or right. 

scientific integrity,

then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. 

For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid

So I call these things Cargo Cult Science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

So we really ought to look into theories that don’t work, and science that isn’t science.

There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down—or hardly going up—in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. 

Privacy does not mean stopping the flow of data; it means channeling it wisely and justly to serve societal ends and values and the individuals who are its subjects, particularly the vulnerable and the disadvantaged.

After all, those who know about us have power over us. They can deny us employment, deprive us of credit, restrict our movements, refuse us shelter, membership, or education, manipulate our thinking, suppress our autonomy, and limit our access to the good life.

Obfuscation assumes that the signal can be spotted in some way and adds a plethora of related, similar, and pertinent signals — a crowd which an individual can mix, mingle, and, if only for a short time, hide

A life lived in social isolation means living far from centers of business and commerce, without access to many forms of credit, insurance, or other significant financial instruments, not to mention the minor inconveniences and disadvantages — long waits at road toll cash lines, higher prices at grocery stores, inferior seating on airline flights.

But if we are nearly as observed and documented as any person in history, our situation is a prison that, although it has no walls, bars, or wardens, is difficult to escape.

“These results together corroborate the idea that … nonhuman animals have a theory of mind and do not simply rely on behavior rules to interpret and anticipate others’ actions,” they write.

Schoolchildren were simply told not to write in books. But this also has to do with a kind of post-romantic belief that the reader should be receptive rather than active—that the book should change us, rather than us changing the book. But if you look at earlier copies of printed books, it’s almost a kind of collaborative effort where the printed book is raw material that the user could make his or her own. This could even take the form of literally tearing apart the book and recycling the pages.

What stands in the way of our reading great literature is almost never the medium; it’s almost always time. It’s about what other activities we need to give up in order to read.

One function of a history of reading is to serve as a corrective to nostalgia, for a path that was limited to a few decades.

We kid ourselves if we think that the presence of printed books would magically make us more attentive and more focused.

One is the death of a particular kind of object that looks and feels and smells a certain way. And the other is a set of practices or activities, which that object has sometimes prompted.

Why not consider that plants have been doing the same for far longer than we have been around, with an intelligence that is radically different from ours?

Instead, they accost the viewer with nature’s power and its fragility.

Nearly every appeal to nature, however, evokes only a sense of alienation. The older people fawning over their favorite trees come off as fanatics with hyperniche interests, and the installations showing the human impact on the environment are so distressingly common that it’s difficult to engage with them as if for the first time.

The common understanding of “intelligence” would have to be reimagined; and we’d have missed an entire universe of thought happening all around us.

The idea of a “plant intelligence”—an intelligence that goes beyond adaptation and reaction and into the realm of active memory and decision-making—has been in the air since at least the early seventies.

“Trees do not have will or intention. They solve problems, but it’s all under hormonal control, and it all evolved through natural selection.”

The idea of a joint stock company was one of Tudor England’s most brilliant and revolutionary innovations.

With cancer we see uncontrolled cellular division and the spread of cancer cells throughout the body, and in depression we see the workings of neurotransmitters and how molecules affect mood.

And while his first suicide attempt was about the fear of never finding love, his second fear, equally unwarranted, was that he was a complete failure as a provider.

We are prone to see consciousness in puppets and other, even less likely objects.

Attention, therefore, is the name of the game for a visual predator.

Insects are brainier than people think.

This signal enhancement is a direct consequence of neurons inhibiting their neighbors, a process called lateral inhibition.

A nerve net doesn’t process information—not in any meaningful sense

200 feet per second

there is a publication bias that favors papers that successfully reject the null hypothesis. Therefore, scholars have both substantial and practical incentives to prefer statistically significant results.

here are situations where interpretation of the p value requires caution and we suggest four warnings: (1) scholars must always graphically analyze their data before interpreting the p value; (2) it is pointless to estimate the p value for non-random samples; (3) the p value is highly affected by the sample size, and (4) it is pointless to estimate the p value when dealing with data from population5.

Statistical significance testing has involved more fantasy than fact.

What else is there? Sex and physics.

Einstein had this deep-seated need to be an outsider.

And it probably made him a little too cocky about the power of pure thought.

“What matters is how the parts affect each other, not what is inside them.”

. Other construction materials will have their own basic components and ways to be put together. Most of the powerful ideas are in the designs of the combinations.

The illusion had to be created that diamonds were forever -- "forever" in the sense that they should never be resold.

Both women and men had to be made to perceive diamonds not as marketable precious stones but as an inseparable part of courtship and married life.

The diamond invention is far more than a monopoly for fixing diamond prices; it is a mechanism for converting tiny crystals of carbon into universally recognized tokens of wealth, power, and romance.

Superiority in natural gifts is a blessing, not a moral virtue.

This is just the same old story where top-down expectation meets incoming sensory signals with a balance that is determined by how confident you are in either the sensory signals or your top-down predictions.

We very much expect, given a certain bit of face information, that the rest of that information will specify a convex, outward-looking face.

The nature of intelligence looks very different when we think of it as a rolling process that is embedded in bodies or embedded in worlds. Processes like that give rise to real understandings of a structured world.

how we can get something like a quantifiable grip on how neural processing weaves together with bodily processing weaves together with actions out there in the world.

Stories contrast with other forms of discourse, in other words, with other ways of organizing thought. There’s description, a state of affairs in space or time. Like a map or a schedule. Descriptions don’t have a prescribed order, a beginning, middle, and end. Explanations do. They also add causality. You start one place, something happens, and you end up somewhere else.

we could change your memory in real time by the perspective we gave you to recollect them.

Stories of course are another kind of structure the mind uses to organize events in time or place.

The brain doesn’t only predict what will happen next as we act in the world. It also stores information, puts stuff into categories and themes and hierarchies and more, often information that has no immediate use and may never have a use.

one-bit thinking in a two-bit world.

spatial thinking is the foundation of thought. Not the entire edifice, but the foundation.

Modes of perception and action also guide our mental as well as worldly representations of those spaces, how we think about them, how we think with them, how we communicate them.

cognitive tools, like maps and abacuses and diagrams and sketches, but also gestures.

I thought, what about faces? We recognize thousands of them in a split second but we are hard put to describe them precisely enough for others to pick them out. Spatial thinking is prior to language, I thought, both developmentally and evolutionarily. Spatial thinking must have its own logic, not necessarily that of language. If anything, language had to be built on spatial thinking, not the reverse.

how or whether propositions could account for memory for the visual-spatial world.

There’s aesthetics too. Some people like curves, others like lines.

categorical associations were more sophisticated than thematic ones.

If it’s in the brain, it must be real.

So many people today – and even professional scientists – seem to me like somebody who has seen thousands of trees but has never seen a forest. A knowledge of the historic and philosophical background gives that kind of independence from prejudices of his generation from which most scientists are suffering.

. A map is in its essence an analog device, using a picture to represent another picture.

If a restaurant has a one-page menu that's usually a pretty good sign, it means their line cooks have become specialists and can usually nail all the dishes listed.Conversely, if a restaurant has a giant, multi-page menu that's a gigantic red flag. The longer the menu the better the odds that you're paying to eat a boiled bag frozen meal.

How could you communicate with the future?

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU

there was no way of shutting it off completely.

This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws),

It was partly the unusual geography of the room

It is an unbreakable cipher, yet it could be mastered by children.

Its inscriptions had the force of magic, but their meanings were not in themselves sacred.

The written word was a conduit of magical power, which could be harnessed for various ends.