discovery............................

 Every person you meet knows an amazing lot about something you know virtually nothing about.  It won't be obvious, and your job is to discover what it is.

-Kevin Kelly

But........................

 

via

Leave it to The Onion..................

.....................................................to deliver the hard news.

On mining big data...........................

"Plumbing the depths of chaos, it divines meaning."

"In the 1980's,it was still possible for an amateur to learn everything humans knew about the planets.  Today, that's no longer true.  The Alps of raw data would take more than one lifetime to summit, passing countless Ph D dissertations at campsites along the trail."

"How extraordinary that we've created peripheral brains to discover truths about nature that we seek.  We're teaching them how to work together calmly as a society, share data at lightning speed, and to cooperate so much better than we do, rubbing brains together in the invisible drawing room we sometimes call the 'cloud.'  Undaunted, despite our physical and mental limitations, we design robots to continue the quest we began long ago:  making sense of nature."

-Diane Ackerman,  The Human Age:  The World Shaped By Us

Feeling like a bullseye..................

via

You might think this is a close-up snap-shot of.......

......................Kurt's grilling-ready charcoal, but actually it is a photo of the rarely-seen center of our very own Milky Way galaxy:

People, can you get your mind around the notion that, according to scientists' estimates, there are 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe - and,  "the Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy some 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter which contains 100–400 billion stars. It may contain at least as many planets as well."?  The mind reels.

larger photo and description is here

I hate it when they do that.......................

So, I am on-line reading this very interesting essay on Scott Walker and his lack of a college degree at the National Review, when out of the corner of my eye I spot this Amazon advertisement:

Faithful readers will note that in the past week or so I have posted excerpts from  Infidel Kings and Holy Warriors and from Bergson's Creative Evolution.   Am I the only one who thinks this whole cyber knowing thing is getting a bit creepy?

Coincidence........................................

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.” 
-Susan B. Anthony

Hey, wait a minute..............

Do you mean that "experts" say meaningless things?

Rules.....................................

From the wide, wide world of Goldman Sachs (?) comes this unofficial guide to being a man.  Conclusion is here:
Remember, “rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men.” 

More about the chaos theory..............

From our Wiki friends:
Small differences in initial conditions (such as those due to rounding errors in numerical computation) yield widely diverging outcomes for such dynamical systems, rendering long-term prediction impossible in general.

Chaos: When the present determines the future, but the approximate present does not approximately determine the future.

From 30-Second Theories:
You leave the house five minutes late - and miss your train to the airport.  Then when you reach the airport, you have missed your flight and discover the next flight is not until tomorrow.  A five-minute overrun has ballooned into a whole day's delay.  This is an everyday example of what mathematicians  call a non-linear phenomenon, where small effects do not necessarily have small consequences.  Chaos Theory focuses on such situations, the outcomes of which are often neither totally random, not totally predictable.

'Nuff said.

via

Shamans.....................................

"It is beyond belief that we know so little about how people get rich or poor, about how it is they come to dwell in comfort and health or die in penury and disease. Financial markets are the machines in which much of human welfare is decided; yet we know more about how our car engines work than about how our global financial system functions. We lurch from crisis to crisis. In a networked world, mayhem in one market spreads instantaneously to all others—and we have only the vaguest of notions how this happens, or how to regulate it. So limited is our knowledge that we resort, not to science, but to shamans. We place control of the world's largest economy in the hands of a few elderly men, the central bankers."
-Benoit Mandelbrot

Sneak pre-view.......................

NASA has prepared a video for December 22, 2012, the day after the world didn't end (hopefully).  The Mayans were pretty smart folk.  It might pay us better to stop dwelling on their calendar and start thinking about the things they knew and how did they know them and - the big one - where did they go?  Anyway, enjoy the video.

If there was a beginning.........................

Probability.............

"Ce que nous connaissons est peu de chose, ce que nous ignorons est immense."
( "What we know is not much. What we do not know is immense.")
-Pierre-Simon Laplace

Fortunately...............

"I am not young enough to know everything."
-Oscar Wilde

It's a comfort............

to know that I'm not a sociopath.   Take the test yourownself.