OMIGOSH, no. You complete mistook me. Sorry. I am the last person to
compare math to rat turds. Turds of any kind, for that matter. My
{recently} late big brother was a mathematician. Some of my best friends
(and favorite collaborators) are mathematicians. The point was only that
number of rat turds ."fecal boluses" was the term of art . was desirable
just because it was clear and easily understood (like mathematical
expressions for entropy). Yet, just as you could never get the world to
agree that emotionality was just the number of fecal boluses left by a rat
in an open field maze, you will never get the world to agree that entropy is
just the output of a mathematical formula. They might say, "that is a
useful measure of entropy, but that is not what it IS." To put the matter
more technically, no matter how much reliability a definition buys you, it
still does not necessarily buy you validity. The same point might be made
about f=ma. (I fear being flamed by Bruce, at this point, but let it go.)
Non fingo hypotheses and all that. One could, like a good positivist,
simply assert that a thing IS that which most reliably measures it, but few
people outside your field will be comfortable with that, and everybody, even
including your closest colleagues, will continue to use the word in some
other sense at cocktail parties. It was my position that the lab bench
meaning and the cocktail meaning have some common core that we have some
responsibility to try to find.
Sorry, again. I certainly didn't mean to be insulting
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
<http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 8:46 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Notions of entropy
Do you really feel that turds are equivalent to probability measures?
I can see that a mouse emits more turds when excited, that's fine. It
doesn't lead to measures of security on the internet. It doesn't quantify
information.
And thermodynamics and information theory have made good use of the
probabilistic reduction of entropy. And it is concrete and well defined.
So what's wrong with that?
-- Owen
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Nick Thompson <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
OK, I'll bite your bite. For the same reason that the world was outraged
when some experimental psychologists defined emotionality as the number of
turds left in an open field maze by a white rat.
N
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
<http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/>
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> ] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Notions of entropy
OK, I'll bite. Why NOT let entropy simply be an equation that is useful in
certain domains?
I rather like the lack of ambiguity.
-- Owen
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Russell Standish <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> > wrote:
On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 08:49:44PM -0400, [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Most recently, I've been going through the same exercise
> (again for a chapter, now not in a book of my own) for
> "recursion" and "recursive". Again, I have accumulated
... what a mess!
Back in the day when I was teaching computational science for a
living, I had to carefully explain the difference between two distinct
meanings of recursion.
1) A "recursive loop" is one whose iterations depend on values computed
in the previous loop. Related obviously to the "oldest" mathematical
definition you gave. It impedes vectorisation and parallelisation of
said loop.
2) A "recursive function" is one that calls itself, a term quite
familiar to people brought up in computer science.
In the good old days, when men programmed in Fortran, concept 1 was
always meant, as Fortran did not support recursion. That has all
changed now :).
And there is a third meaning for recursion used by theoretical
computer scientists, where is basically means a computable
function. See page 29 of Li and Vitanyi's tome of Kolmogorov complexity.
Cheers
-
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof Russell Standish Phone 0425 253119 (mobile)
Principal, High Performance Coders
Visiting Professor of Mathematics [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>
University of New South Wales http://www.hpcoders.com.au
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