The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.
Those who have previously been subscribed by email will continue to receive email notifications of new posts as before. WordPress.com followers will only see new posts in the Reader. You will not receive email updates unless you subscribe to receive those on the new site. Some older subscribers may have missed one or two recent posts in the transition this week, so feel free to take a moment to catch up.
Others subscribed via RSS may potentially need to update their RSS feeds to reflect the change.
I’ve set up 301 page redirects so that those visiting old URL pages should automatically be redirected to the appropriate pages, but some may need to use the search box functionality to find the article or notes they were looking for.
If you have any issues/problems in this transition that you can’t seem to remedy directly, please email me directly; I’m happy to help.
Thanks for reading!
We had to prove the theorems ourselves—with hints, of course—and as a result didn’t get very far, covering perhaps a fourth of what might be done in a conventional lecture. But so what? The most persistent myth of mathematics education is that what is covered is the same as what is learned. We didn’t cover much, but we sure did learn.
To understand God’s thought, we must study statistics, for these are the measure of His purpose.
To put it saucily: information theory is something like the logarithm of probability theory. In early modern times the logarithm simplified multiplication into addition which was more accessible to calculation. Today, information theory transforms many quantities of probability theory into quantities which allow simpler bookkeeping.
More seriously, information theory is one of the most universal concepts with applications in computer science, mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry and other fields. It allows a lucid and transparent analysis of many systems and provides a framework to study and compare seemingly different systems using the same language and notions.
Not only a great quote, but an interesting way to view the subjects.
I have known more people whose lives have been ruined by getting a Ph.D. in physics than by drugs.
In the essay, Dr. Katz provides a bevy of solid reasons why one shouldn’t become a researcher. I highly recommend everyone read it and then carefully consider how we can turn these problems around.
Editor’s Note: The original article has since been moved to another server.
Surely, God could have caused birds to fly with their bones made of solid gold, with their veins full of quicksilver, with their flesh heavier than lead, and with their wings exceedingly small. He did not, and that ought to show something. It is only in order to shield your ignorance that you put the Lord at every turn.
One cool judgment is worth a dozen hasty councils. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat.
Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Although not everyone is mindful of it, all cell biologists have two cells of interest: the one they are studying, and Escherichia coli.
Regard the physical world as made of information, with energy and matter as incidentals.
It behooves us always to remember that in physics it has taken great minds to discover simple things. They are very great names indeed which we couple with the explanation of the path of a stone, the droop of a chain, the tints of a bubble, the shadows in a cup.
The next [major] thrust [in biology], the one that may bring us closer to the Archimedian ideal of science, we may expect to come from information theory.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, it was already clear that, chemically speaking, you and I are not much different from cans of soup. And yet we can do many complex and even fun things we do not usually see cans of soup doing.
Food is a product of economic supply and demand, so try to figure out where the supplies are fresh, the suppliers are creative, and the demanders are informed.
