Philosophy « hjalli.com – Hjálmar Gíslason

Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category

Scientists Have Found That Scientists Are Often Wrong

Posted in english, Philosophy on January 2, 2004 | 2 Comments »

I tend to be very skeptical about news articles where the headline reads: “Scientists have found that…”. Too often the scientist or researchers involved aren’t even named and there is no way of digging in further to see if it was indeed professional scientific work that led to the conclusion. This is especially annoying as [...]

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Exams: We Have Changed, They Haven’t

Posted in english, Philosophy on December 22, 2003 | 1 Comment »

I just had a period of exams. Don’t get me wrong, I think I did ok on most of them so this entry is not to blame “it” on something, but I started thinking about the nature of exams, what they are for and how they are performed. To my best knowledge, exams today are [...]

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The Lowest Integer Number not Found on the Web

Posted in english, Ideas, Philosophy on November 30, 2003 | 11 Comments »

A long time ago I heard about a funny paradox. The paradox was about the lowest integer number that was not special in any way. “Special numbers” were defined by certain rules. Even numbers were special, so were prime numbers, any multiple of 5, 2 in any power and any number with two digits alike. [...]

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More Monkey Math

Posted in english, Philosophy on November 18, 2003 | 1 Comment »

The Famous Brett Watson has written a detailed and intelligent response to my entry “Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing“. In my entry I discussed that while a thousand monkeys typing randomly might not reproduce so much as a single quote from the works of Shakespeare – ever, a thousand monkeys with minimum understanding of the theory [...]

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Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing

Posted in english, Philosophy on November 16, 2003 | 1 Comment »

“A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters will eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare.” This quote is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most faithful followers in the debate that followed the publication of “Origin of Species” in 1859. Other versions of the quote have a million monkeys or an infinite number [...]

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The Needs and Rights of Humans and Robots

Posted in english, Ideas, Philosophy on November 11, 2003 | Leave a Comment »

In the Wetware post last week on “A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam” I proposed methods that would prevent robots from posting comments. Kalsey commented that there are clear indications that many spam comments are actually posted manually, rather than by robots, rendering my proposed functionality obviously useless in these cases. The day [...]

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Design with Nature as Role Model

Posted in Biomimicry, english, Philosophy on November 5, 2003 | 1 Comment »

This entry is adapted from a presentation I did at the University of Iceland today, hence all the decorations. Using nature as a role model in design is one of my biggest interests. By this notion I’m talking about how we can study nature and use its solutions, designs and methods when making our own [...]

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Unified Knowledge

Posted in english, Philosophy on October 17, 2003 | 1 Comment »

I had an exam in the Philosophy of Science this week, so I’m still somewhat on the philosophical note. Science has of course interested me for a long time, but I had not really taken a good look at the foundations before. This should of course be obligatory for anyone that wants to be a [...]

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