Category: Uncategorized
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The Rabbit Hole Problem
The recent Apple test on AI models (see Guardian report here) reports that “these models fail to develop generalisable reasoning capabilities”. What does this mean?Imagine a huge Easter egg hunt. There are a billion rabbit holes, each one a billion miles long, with billions of branches. The egg hunt requires you to find a single…
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What art is
Art is a new connection of ideas.. An idea is any imagined event. Ideas are the artist’s material. An idea can be trivial or complex. “Let’s go to the park” is an idea. This event has been imagined and has happened many times. “Maybe the earth goes around the sun in an elliptical orbit” is…
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Quantum physics in ten short paragraphs
These are the only things you need to know about quantum physics unless you are a physicist or a mathematician. These facts explain all the so called mysteries of quantum physics. Nothing weird or inexplicable happens. Waves are waves of probability. Particles are never waves. The probabilities of the positions of particles are entangled mathematically.…
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Probability and advertising
People spend money on advertising on the basis that it will work. Most end up disappointed. But they are disappointed for a strange reason. What they have done has almost always achieved results, but they don’t know why. This is the real cause of dissatisfaction. David Ogilvy’s famous observation is still true: “Half my advertising…
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The Quantum Mechanics of Marketing
This is an essay I wrote a while ago. It is in draft form but contains some useful ideas Marketing theory is not in a good place. On the one hand we have data analytics, whose practitioners are driven by hard functionality. This crushes creative thinking, for which the only credible theoretical opposition to this…
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woke/unwoke
I notice something strange about the use of the word ‘woke’. It is used to identify people who are imagined to be opposed to people who use it. So you hear something like “I have nothing against x people, but I won’t tolerate the fact that they won’t tolerate anyone who is in fact against…
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Rain and Steam
‘Rain Steam and Speed’ (J M W Turner 1844) is one of my favourite paintings. To the modern viewer, it appears easily accessible. It is almost universally thought beautiful and it is often said to have been the forerunner of impressionist painting, and mark the beginning of a modern era of visual art. Perhaps it…
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Relationism
Characters in stories have three categories of existence. They act, they relate to each other and they have relativity to each other. In the first respect, they are functional and structural. That’s pretty clear. Without action there would be no plot. However, the other two categories are constantly muddled up, although having a relationship and…
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The escape from language
The study of the role of language in the formation of reasoning and the recording of observation has a difficult and undignified past. On the one hand, a record must be made, which, if it is to be validated, must be recordable. For the same reason, this record of the record must in turn be…
The Swiveller 