Month: July 2008

Relativity as Informational Interdependence

Ever have the experience of sitting in traffic and believe that you are moving in reverse, only to realize a second later that you were fooled by the vehicle next to you moving forward? You were sitting still, but because you saw something moving away, you mistakenly thought you started to move in the opposite direction. Two different senses may be at work here: your sight and your balance. Lets assume that your balance did […]

Video Game Design 4: Matrix Bullet-time

Johnny Chung Lee pretty much shocked the entire video game world (and lots of others) with this video (5.8 million views, 5/5 star rating with 21,000 votes): This is a pretty nifty bit of engineering, using the off the shelf Wii Remote and a relatively cheap extra (safety glasses with IR leds <15$) to provide a very high level virtual reality setup. Secondly Nintendo has recently come out with the Wii Balance Board. This peripheral […]

links, cause even though

i’m at the end of the internet, you may not be. Animal of the Month: NYC Pimp What a Pimp Reads – New York Times Blog “What sort of person subjects children as young as 12 to beatings and a life of prostitution? An evidence list submitted in the case of Corey Davis, a Queens man who billed himself as “Magnificent,” might provide some insight. Mr. Davis, 36, is facing a minimum of 23 years […]

Getting Around Gettier

The Gettier argument (and its descendants) run thusly… Someone thinks they know x. However, due to factor y, they do not know x. These sorts of thought experiments are used regularly to undermine different accounts of knowledge. Generally I think they are effective but there is one gray area that is under-appreciated. When the thought experiment is introduced, it is generally assumed to be unproblematic: whoever is setting up the thought experiment is defining the […]

A Counterexample to Skepticism

The statement, “Either something happened or something didn’t happen,” is immune to skepticism. If a skeptic tries to doubt it, then something has happened, making the statement true. If no one doubts it and nothing happened, then the statement is again true. Therefore you may have absolute certainty that something has or has not happened. Moreover, this statement has it’s uses: I can imagine mothers all over the country trying to impress upon their teenagers […]

A note on epistemology

Justified true belief does not yield knowledge, and everyone should know this by now. Beyond Gettier’s argument, is this tack I heard given by Jaakko Hintikka: You may believe something, fine, and have whatever justifications you wish. But how do you know the thing is true? The point he was making was that far beyond the issue of problems in having the right sort of justifications is the problem of having truth as well. Whenever […]