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I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).

science

Ignorance & Confidence

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

  1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
  2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
  3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
  4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

Dunning-Kruger effect – Wikipedia

This explains a lot.

Hat tip to Tim Walker for mentioning the effect.

Topology

Science News has a great description of Topology in their article Tied Up in Knots, which is the field of study my good friend Ken has decided to use as his focus for his academic research (he has a doctorate in the field). His explanations always make sense when he lays it all out, the knowledge tends to slip through my head within a week. So, this article is very helpful, and I’m adding it to my site for future reference. Here’s the heart of the definition:

Topology studies shapes. Specifically, it studies shapes’ properties that are not affected by stretching, moving, twisting, or pulling—anything that doesn’t break up the object or fuse some of its parts. The proverbial example is that, to a topologist, a coffee mug is the same as a doughnut. In your imagination, you can squash the mug into a doughnut shape, and it will retain the property of having a hole, namely its handle.

A sphere is different. You can stretch a sphere into a stick and bend the stick so its ends touch. But turning that open ring into a doughnut will involve fusing the ends, and that’s forbidden.

Intelligent Curves

The study, to be published this week, shows that men who admire women with hourglass figures do so because they are more intelligent and therefore produce more intelligent children than waif-like women or those of “apple-shaped” proportions.

As noted in the Telegraph article, Another reason why men like curves, a test of 16,000 women and girls showed that those “with a greater difference between their waist and hip measurements scored significantly higher in [cognitive] tests, as did their children.” Oh, and apparently they live longer.

Curves are good.

It's a small world

The Size Of Our World is a great visual comparison of Earth, the other bodies in our solar system and some stars within our galaxy. While the site is far from polished, this simple page does a great job displaying the enormous scale of the larger planets and stars compared to our rock and each other. Link via BoingBoing.

Dream Anatomy: A National Library of Medicine Exhibit

Dream Anatomy Provided by the National Library of Medicine “shows off the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present.” There are some gorgeous pieces ranging from educational to entertaining. Even better, the work is in the public domain!

The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.

Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism. We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality, a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition.

Found via Boing Boing