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grovehaw | 6 years ago | on: Three typefaces for mathematics (2007) [pdf]

The document was created in Adobe InDesign CS2 (4.0.5). This means all the features you find unappealing are the result of conscious decisions. The strange use of empty pages is due to being a print on paper document governed by the strict rules of an academic thesis.

I also think the designer is working in a different tradition to the one you value. I see echoes of the work of Donald Tufte, Jost Hochull and Hans Hagen.

grovehaw | 6 years ago | on: Think in Math, Write in Code

Some people feel at home with APL (A Programming Language) or its descendants. It was first developed by Ken Iverson as a notation to be used on paper for communicating procedures and algorithms. It was the subject of a book published in 1962, then became a programming language running on IBM mainframes in 1966.

The following line of code produces all the prime numbers below the value R.

  (~T∊T∘.×T)/T←1↓⍳R
More history and a full explanation of this code can be found at https://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/the-apl-programming-la...

grovehaw | 7 years ago | on: How to Brexit? – Explore the (im)possibilities of the different Brexit scenarios

Unlike the US which painstakingly separated powers into different branches of government, the UK habit of governance is to fuse powers together.

This gives rise to the concept of the King or Queen in Parliament. That is to say absolute authority resides with the Monarch but is delegated to his/her parliament. Parliament then generates legislation to which the Sovereign assents. The Royal Assent has not happened in person since 1854.

grovehaw | 7 years ago | on: Poor mental health at work 'widespread'

In the UK the definitions have a fair amount of consensus and the loss of productivity is one of the motivations for a range of employers organisations to support this initiative.

The UK's Mental Health Foundation gives these figures:

   >  1. Mixed anxiety & depression is the most common mental disorder in Britain,
   >      with 7.8% of people meeting criteria for diagnosis.
   >  2. 4-10% of people in England will experience depression in their lifetime.
   >  3. Common mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are distributed 
   >       according to a gradient of economic disadvantage across society. The poorer 
   >       and more disadvantaged are disproprotionately[sic] affected by common mental health 
   >       problems and their adverse consequences.
   >  4. Mixed anxiety and depression has been estimated to cause one 
   >      fifth of days lost from work in Britain.
   >  5. One adult in six had a common mental disorder.
https://www.mentalhealth.org.uk/publications/fundamental-fac... [pdf]

grovehaw | 7 years ago | on: Can Mark Zuckerberg Fix Facebook Before It Breaks Democracy?

It is not so much about changing the beliefs of a potential voter as modifying their behaviour. In this case giving them enough of a reason to stay at home rather than vote. As the article states:

  > During the campaign, Trump used Facebook to raise two 
  > hundred and eighty million    dollars. Just days before
  > the election, his team paid for a voter-suppression 
  > effort on the platform. According to Bloomberg 
  > Businessweek, it targeted three Democratic 
  > constituencies—“idealistic white liberals, young women, 
  > and African Americans”—sending them videos precisely 
  > tailored to discourage them from turning out for Clinton.
  > Theresa Hong, the Trump campaign’s digital-content 
  > director, later told an interviewer, “Without Facebook 
  > we wouldn’t have won.”

grovehaw | 7 years ago | on: Practical Common Lisp (2009)

One way to use Common Lisp with a more immutable flavour is to use the folio2 library.[0]

I have enjoyed exploring it a great deal. The project's readme, explains it better than I can:

"folio 2 is a collection of small libraries that provide support for functional idioms and data structures in Common Lisp and a common set of APIs for working with them.

"It's a direct descendant of the older and simpler folio library, with a greatly expanded and reorganized API, and support for more data structures and procedures.

[0] https://github.com/mikelevins/folio2

grovehaw | 7 years ago | on: The Lifespan of a Lie – Why can’t we escape the Stanford Prison Experiment?

Ten years earlier a book was published which was a work of sociology based on participant observation, an approach many here would regard as unscientific. It was very much an explanation of behaviour in the real world.

Erving Goffman's Asylums [0], in its four essays, identifies the creation of social roles and related rituals as the raw material of the social institution. In this case the institution was a real mental hospital.

My take on the kind of psychological experiment under discussion is that by studying an artificial social situation they have already failed. The petri dish of a very small mock prison on a campus just doesn't tell us anything very useful. Yet we can see eye catching results being amplified and then becoming part myth and part morality tale. However, the belief that human agency is contingent and flawed, that we often don't know how we know the things we know[1], or whey we do the things we do remains.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylums_(book) [1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Our-Knowledge-Growth-Wittgenstein-R...

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