Quote of the Day

“And since this sea is full of savage creatures, some were snatched up and killed by them, while others were dashed against the sharp rocks; some men perished because they did not know how to swim, and still others died from the cold. So that is what happened to the fleet there.”

Excerpt From: Herodotus, Robert B. Strassler. “The Landmark Herodotus: Histories [2007, 2009].” iBooks.

As you can see, the world tends to be a coproduct.

(no subject)

I have a feeling that any process that involves feedback can be modeled as a monoid, because all you do is mapping a feedback number + current state number to a desired state number.

Open-ended future is more difficult because we don't know what kind of feedback and periodicity we want to have.

(no subject)

An interesting piece of research on developmental cognition:

In a monumental study involving 709 children, Alloway et al. tested the development of working memory capacity with a number of tasks.48 They documented a linear increase in working memory capacity from age four to age eleven.
...
An increase of only one chunk in working memory could herald the emergence of an entire range of qualitatively distinct cognitive operations.
doi: 10.1111/nyas.12189

First, I wanted to write that a good pre- and elementary school would be essential for development. Then, I thought that we don't quite know what "good" means in this context. Maybe the Finnish education model works because they expose kids to a broad variety of tasks from an early age.