When A Leaf Turns

Roughly translated, agnosiophobia means “fear of not knowing” or “fear of a lack of knowledge”. Specifically this means the irrational fear of something not being known, not only personally but in general. This often results in an irrational assertion that in fact the thing being considered is actually known. When pressed the sufferer of this phobia will claim that they don’t have the knowledge themselves, but that they know where to get such knowledge. Most commonly this assertion refers to a deity of some sort, though in some cases the assertion that it is known is enough without also having to assert where and with whom such knowledge exists. In all cases contemplating the idea that the answer is not known by anyone is cause for great anxiety and is to be avoided at all cost.

_{*I “invented” this word, though I’m guessing it’s already been made up many times in the past already, so I make no actual claim of originality. A quick Google revealed the existence of the word (namely as a blog), but no concrete definition.}

‘Nuff said.

(Thanks David Pescovitz over at Boing Boing)

Until now I thought I was the only person who was silly enough to teach myself calculus just for the fun of it. It turns out there is at least one other person as crazy as I am.

Most people who find out that I did such a thing immediately assume that I’m some kind of math whiz, when in fact I did it precisely because I suck so bad at it. In college I took some math classes because I love science and I knew that a good mathematical base could help a whole lot. I got to pre-calculus and scored a hard won D, the lowest score I’ve ever gotten in any class I’ve ever taken in my entire life*. I HAD to take it again, if for no other reason than to erase that blight from my academic record. The second time around, through much hard work and perseverence I was able to raise that D to a D+. Okay, actually it was the same D. I gave up going to math classes, but I never really gave up trying to learn the math. Over the years I’ve built up quite a collection of math books, which I revisit every once in awhile in a renewed attempt to power through my mathematical mental block. It looks like it might be time to add to that collection. The Manga Guide to Calculus sounds interesting.

And by the way I was right. It really has helped me a lot in thinking about and understanding much of science.

* In reality I’ve gotten many D’s and F’s in my academic career. The difference here was that I was actually trying, where all the other bad scores were classes that I didn’t give a damn about.

This was so obviously faked! First of all, you never see the punch actually land. Secondly, credible eye witnesses placed Buzz two blocks west when this supposed assault happened. Third, I have in my possession actual footage of the rehearsals of this exchange which I plan to release as soon as I can guarantee the safety of me and my family. Finally, if you watch very closely you can see the head snap back and to the left just before moving out of sight, indicating a second punch-man behind the cafe sign.

I’m not saying there’s a vast government conspiracy to make Buzz look awesome. I’m just a simple man asking simple questions.

I absolutely love this story from the Onion. What would an alternate history of an alternate history look like? What would the world look like if the Axis had won the war? And then what would their world look like if the Allies had won the war? It’s like doing a literal translation of a phrase into another language and then doing another literal translation back into the original.

Since history is written by the winners, the Axis would be considered the good guys, and the Allies would be the enemies. How evil would the world be if the enemies had won?

I’m still alive. I’m in the process of beta testing a new app at work which is taking up a whole lot of my time. Hopefully soon that’ll be done and I can get back to posting interesting things more often.

Anyway, here’s a quick little story that piqued my interest. Maybe it’ll pique yours too.

Signature of antimatter detected in lightning

Thanks to Dr. Dembski for pointing me to this cool little doohickey. It shows the relative scales of various biological structures. Really really cool!

Cell Size and Scale

(image stolen from Dr. Dembski’s post over at UD…don’t know where he got it)