Illusions

An interesting blog article named "Hallucinatory neurophysics
" can be found here: http://preposterousuniverse.blogspot.com/2005/02/hallucinatory-neurophysics.html. Unfortuntally I wasn't able to find the paper by now. (There are, by the way, some nice videos about hallucinatory drugs on youtube, and some good articles in Spektrum). And Jack Cowans appointment to math and neurology also sounds pretty interesting. Computational neuroscience seems to be a field of its own.
I came there via a blog about "imagining more than 3 dimensions" at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2009/03/30/why-cant-we-visualize-more-than-three-dimensions/.

That previous blog post reminded me of the "Imagining the tenth dimenson" video ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjsgoXvnStY ) which I first watched years ago. This version contains some annotations taken from the book (for which the video is supposed to be pomotional material I guess). I found them not too easy to follow and I doubt the correctness of some claims. But to discuss this I'd need the book, but one at the first glace strange thing is his integration of Everett's many-world interpretation of quantum physics.

edit: I found a paper which seems to have a similar focus: "Geometric Visual Hallucinations, Euclidean Symmetry, and the Functional Architecture of Striate Cortex" at http://www.math.utah.edu/~bresslof/publications/01-1.pdf

Stanford University lectures

I (was) stumbled over the stanford university youtube channel, containing a quite large collection of video-taped lectures:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=stanforduniversity&view=playlists

The modern physics series seems to be ok, if you don't exspect abstract math concepts explained in detail but are ok with the that's-all-we-need kind of math (or know the concepts anyways). Watch the first 10 minutes of the quantum mechanics part if you want some explaination of the purpose of lecture series.
The chemical engineering lectures seem to be stupid. I suppose they're quite self-contained in regard of the missing slides if you only have the videos, but seriously, I strongly dislike the professor and his attitude. And I so would have failed his class for he over-emphazises excercises so extremly..ridiculous :>

Nothing to tell about the rest of the lectures, maybe some point later.

Some small addition to the philosphy of science post: Popper wrote quite some chapters about probability and theories based on that. He disregared this notion for being only meta-physical, not scientific. As for my understanding, he says you need to find some way of falsification of a theory to get it out of the meta-physical trap.

philosophy of science - popper vs howson

The current german edition of the "scientific american" magazine contains an essay about philosophy of science. It's questioning the Karl Popper view of theories in science and the idea of falsification of theories. The rivaling idea is one of "degrees of belief" by Colin Howson. I haven't accessed his book (scientific reasoning: the bayesian approach) yet and can only link a review for now (http://www.glennshafer.com/assets/downloads/review15.pdf ).
I don't really like the idea (even though it scores some imporant points and Popper might fail at some) because of its randomness. For me it seems more like a guideline to establishing theories which ultimately adhere Popper's requirements. I'll write more on it once I've read the book and got a better grip on the whole picture of howson's theory.

killing sprees, egoshooter / killer games

For once, some words in German.

Due to the intended nature of this blog, I moved this post to another blog. It can be found at http://misohuroipensi.blogspot.com/2009/04/killing-sprees-egoshooter-killer-games.html

Speed math game

http://www.jimmyr.com/blog/speed_math.swf

Are you a genius, too? There are some videos on youtube teaching how to apply the speed arithmetic method the author uses, but you don't need to use in order to get all stars in that game.

Suffrage for children?

Some nice thoughts about voting rights for children can be found here:

http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=389

Tiling wm for windows

http://freenet-homepage.de/bug.n/index.html is an interesting add-on for linux users working on windows. Bases on dwm. I'm currently testing it, it has some problems with those fance small colorful windows poping up everywhere on windows.