Greg Linch's Commonplace Book

Oh, hello there. Welcome, interweb traveler. Here's where I share interesting and inspiring links. I hope you enjoy!

we are smarter in our differences than we ever could be when truth was a lonelier affair. The intelligence isn’t in a single conclusion that we all come to — if only — but in the linked network of views from everywhere.

There is a frustrating beauty in the way that knowledge scales.

—[Joho the Blog » 2b2k The public ombudsman (or Facts don’t work the way we want)]

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times,” Ocean said to me as we sat outside the BMW repair shop in North Hollywood, speaking to each other in the dark. “That’s what I get from it. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. In the storytelling and the sonics and everything. That’s what I’ve tried to do, because I just think that’s the purpose of art. Push, you know?

They made use of every technique they could think of: for the ominous strings on “Bad Religion,” they had only a few string players to work with. So the engineer, Jeff Ellis, arranged seating for a large string section in Studio 1 of EastWest Studios, the same room where Frank Sinatra recorded “My Way,” and then used a pair of old stereo ribbon microphones to capture the sound. The players sat in different seats each time they played along with the track, so that when they mixed all of the takes together at the end, it would sound as if they had filled the room with musicians.

They made use of every technique they could think of: for the ominous strings on “Bad Religion,” they had only a few string players to work with. So the engineer, Jeff Ellis, arranged seating for a large string section in Studio 1 of EastWest Studios, the same room where Frank Sinatra recorded “My Way,” and then used a pair of old stereo ribbon microphones to capture the sound. The players sat in different seats each time they played along with the track, so that when they mixed all of the takes together at the end, it would sound as if they had filled the room with musicians.

the three researchers set out to use the letters as a “test bed” for algorithms used in evolutionary biology. The algorithms were designed to take the genomes of various modern creatures and work backward, by inference and deduction, to reconstruct their phylogeny—their evolutionary trees. If these mathematical methods worked with genes, the scientists suggested, they should work with chain letters, too. In both cases the researchers were able to verify mutation rates and relatedness measures.

With enough data and a good model, the system could be used to give early warning signs for disasters by mining individual reports and finding larger patterns in them. The general idea of finding ways to predict diseases isn’t new, nor is the concept of data mining for prediction, but the wide scope of this project makes it potentially very useful — as long as the system is able to successfully draw correlations between events, and to generalize enough to make them useful, it could be applied to any number of situations.

The core purpose of a great lecturer is not primarily to transmit information… The real purpose of a lecture is to show the mind and heart of the lecturer at work, and to engage the minds and hearts of learners.

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notational:

Richard Gunderman makes a case against the alleged death of the lecture as an education format. What he argues for instead is reminiscent of Alain de Botton’s notion of the secular sermon.  (via explore-blog) (via Robin Sloan on Snarkmarket)

(Source: , via slavin)

the process of research is inseparable from the physical process of exploration of the world. In my experience, creative and intellectual work flows from physical engagement with the landscape. There are literal manifestations of this, such as the discovery of forgotten places and the collection of forgotten literature from the shelves of a rural shop. More intangibly, the processes of walking, hiking, or taking a road trip are useful activities for developing new ideas or thinking through puzzles.

…

The associative subject flow itself is designed to facilitate serendipity, and serendipity is enhanced by the practice of creative juxtaposition of materials within subject sections.