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🔗 Mathematics 🔗 Statistics

Anscombe's quartet comprises four data sets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics, yet have very different distributions and appear very different when graphed. Each dataset consists of eleven (x,y) points. They were constructed in 1973 by the statistician Francis Anscombe to demonstrate both the importance of graphing data when analyzing it, and the effect of outliers and other influential observations on statistical properties. He described the article as being intended to counter the impression among statisticians that "numerical calculations are exact, but graphs are rough."

🔗 Literature

"Belling the Cat" is a fable also known under the titles "The Bell and the Cat" and "The Mice in Council". Although often attributed to Aesop, it was not recorded before the Middle Ages and has been confused with the quite different fable of Classical origin titled The Cat and the Mice. In the classificatory system established for the fables by B. E. Perry, it is numbered 613, which is reserved for Mediaeval attributions outside the Aesopic canon.

🔗 Biology 🔗 Physiology

The axial twist theory (a.k.a. axial twist hypothesis) is a proposed scientific theory to explain a range of unusual aspects of the body plan of vertebrates (including humans). It states that the rostral part of the head is "turned around" regarding the rest of the body. This end-part consists of the face (eyes, nose, and mouth) as well as part of the brain (cerebrum and thalamus). According to the theory, the vertebrate body has a left-handed chirality.

The axial twist theory competes with a number of other proposals that focus on more limited, specific aspects, most of which explain contralateral forebrain organization, the phenomenon that the left side of the brain mainly controls the right side of the body and vice versa. None of the proposed theories explaining this phenomenon, including axial twist theory, have gained general recognition. The genetic basis underlying the proposed developmental twist is not yet understood.

The axial twist theory would explain various anatomical phenomena, and addresses how and when the proposed twist between the end of the head and the rest of the body develops. It also addresses the possible evolutionary history. One prediction of the theory was the aurofacial asymmetry, which was then found empirically, albeit by one of the authors of the original theory.

Phenomena the theory can explain include:

• Contralateral organization of the brain
• Left-sided orientation of the heart
• Asymmetric position of the gastrointestinal tract, the liver, and the pancreas
• Optic chiasm
• Chiasm of the trochlear nerve
• Non-crossed olfactory tract
• Aurofacial asymmetry
• Yakovlevian torque
• Asymmetry of the thoracal vertebra

According to the axial twist developmental model, the anterior part of the head turns against the rest of the body, except for the inner organs. Due to this twist, the forebrain and face are turned around such that left and right, but also anterior and posterior are flipped in the adult vertebrate.

🔗 Companies 🔗 China 🔗 Organized Labour

The 996 working hour system (Chinese: 996工作制) is a work schedule commonly practiced by some companies in the People's Republic of China. It derives its name from its requirement that employees work from 9:00 am to 9:00 pm, 6 days per week; i.e. 72 hours per week. A number of Chinese internet companies have adopted this system as their official work schedule. Critics argue that the 996 working hour system is a flagrant violation of Chinese law.

In March 2019 an "anti-996" protest was launched via GitHub.

🔗 Computing

Logic Theorist is a computer program written in 1956 by Allen Newell, Herbert A. Simon and Cliff Shaw. It was the first program deliberately engineered to perform automated reasoning and is called "the first artificial intelligence program". It would eventually prove 38 of the first 52 theorems in Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica, and find new and more elegant proofs for some.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophical literature 🔗 Philosophy/Contemporary philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

"What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). The paper presents several difficulties posed by phenomenal consciousness, including the potential insolubility of the mind–body problem owing to "facts beyond the reach of human concepts", the limits of objectivity and reductionism, the "phenomenological features" of subjective experience, the limits of human imagination, and what it means to be a particular, conscious thing.

Nagel asserts that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." This assertion has achieved special status in consciousness studies as "the standard 'what it's like' locution". Daniel Dennett, while sharply disagreeing on some points, acknowledged Nagel's paper as "the most widely cited and influential thought experiment about consciousness".

🔗 Television 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Japan

"The staff ate it later" (Japanese: この後、スタッフが美味しくいただきました, Hepburn: Kono ato, sutaffu ga oishiku itadakimashita; More fully translated as the staff ate and enjoyed it later) is a caption shown on screen in a Japanese TV program to indicate that the food presented during the program was not thrown away after filming. Some have questioned the authenticity of displaying the caption.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Robotics 🔗 Philosophy/Philosophy of mind

The AI effect is a phenomenon in which advances in artificial intelligence lead to a redefinition of what is considered intelligence, such that capabilities achieved by AI systems are no longer regarded as examples of "real" intelligence.

The concept has been used to describe both a cognitive tendency and a sociotechnical pattern, in which successful AI techniques are reclassified as routine computation or absorbed into other domains.

Historian Pamela McCorduck described this as a recurring feature of AI research, noting that once a problem is solved, it is no longer considered evidence of intelligence. Researcher Rodney Brooks similarly observed that once systems are understood, they are often regarded as "just computation".

🔗 Computer science 🔗 Books

LISP is a university textbook on the Lisp programming language, written by Patrick Henry Winston and Berthold Klaus Paul Horn. It was first published in 1981, and the third edition of the book was released in 1989. The book is intended to introduce the Lisp programming language and its applications.

🔗 Finance & Investment 🔗 Economics 🔗 Books 🔗 Skepticism

Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is an early study of crowd psychology by Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, first published in 1841 under the title Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. The book was published in three volumes: "National Delusions", "Peculiar Follies", and "Philosophical Delusions". A second edition appeared in 1852, reorganizing the three volumes into two and adding numerous engravings. Mackay was an accomplished teller of stories, though he wrote in a journalistic and somewhat sensational style.

The subjects of Mackay's debunking include alchemy, crusades, duels, economic bubbles, fortune-telling, haunted houses, the Drummer of Tedworth, the influence of politics and religion on the shapes of beards and hair, magnetisers (influence of imagination in curing disease), murder through poisoning, prophecies, popular admiration of great thieves, popular follies of great cities, and relics. Present-day writers on economics, such as Michael Lewis and Andrew Tobias, laud the three chapters on economic bubbles.

In later editions, Mackay added a footnote referencing the Railway Mania of the 1840s as another "popular delusion" which was at least as important as the South Sea Bubble. In the 21st century, the mathematician Andrew Odlyzko pointed out, in a published lecture, that Mackay himself played a role in this economic bubble; as a leader writer in The Glasgow Argus, Mackay wrote on 2 October 1845: "There is no reason whatever to fear a crash".