writography, i.e. {calligraphy, typography} and cultural variations

If you've seen old (English?) documents, you might have seen that they used two forms of S, one of which looked like an "f" or an integral sign.

Here's why

Google freaks, I challenge you to find a page with a better explanation.

Btw, to this day, it seems the British like to write their numbers floating around, with for example, the loops of "6" and "9" aligned and the 1 as "I", including a small, round "0" and the decimal point in mid-height (higher than most of the "9").

Oh, and the Dutch write funny "8"s, which look kind of like a cursive "g" with loose ends.

Americans write "9"s with a tail straight down (I learned this from my PalmPilot), and if their "1"s have an upper tail, then they MUST have a "base" otherwise it would be interpreted as a "7" (not so in Brazil, where "7"s must necessarily have a slant).

Btw, does anyone still cross their "7"s?

(no subject)

I just saw the production and cast of Deuce Bigalow, European Gigolo shooting.

Apparently, the original got a low rating, so I don't understand why they are doing a sequel.

There was also some talk of protests by local residents, because they closed a couple of streets for the week.

(no subject)

This course is titled Philosophy of Science, but it's very technical about physics. This is how I wish I had learned my physics. My physics profs never seemed very interested in philosophy, which I find a great shame.


This sounds slightly shaky, but very interesting:
Science as a Language, the Non-Probativity Theorem and the Complementarity of Complexity and Predictability, by Robert K. Logan


From the author of Computational Philosophy of Science, a book enhanced with Lisp code: Coherence in Thought and Action


It turns out that Doug Lenat implemented this idea of mine, a long time ago:
"Shallow" pattern recognition applied to answer the question "which mathematical theorems are "interesting" "?

from http://www.cs.unm.edu/~luger/Chap1final.htm :

"One striking program is AM, the Automated Mathematician, designed to discover mathematical laws (Lenat 1977, 1982). Initially given the concepts and axioms of set theory, AM was able to induce such important mathematical concepts as cardinality, integer arithmetic, and many of the results of number theory. AM conjectured new theorems by modifying its current knowledge base and used heuristics to pursue the most "interesting" of a number of possible alternative theorems. [emphasis mine -GL] "

(no subject)

Lying and Human Detection (very few people are good at detecting it)