What is Digg?60 Comments
- bhaugh, on 10/12/2007, -2/+27It's Digg. It's user-moderated. If it bubbles up, that means people want to read it.
It's a beautiful thing, this determinancy. If you post some hott Chaucer linkz and enough Digg users are interested, it'll get on the front page. And you know what? It will, by definition, belong there, by virtue of the fact that enough people Dugg it.
I would have made a similar argument about editorial focus back when this site first started, but now with the deluge of morons who submit articles with sensational, misspelled, over-punctuated headlines, I'm thankful for ANYTHING that offers the least bit enrichment, insight, or humor without making me want to scream in agony from exclamation point overload.
Lastly: consider the skewed-young Digg audience (no real numbers here, but it's a fair conclusion, given the profuse lamentable postings described above). I wager that the number of users who don't even know who Feynman is outnumber those who do by several orders of magnitude. Or put it this way: if every reader put off by "old news" could be balanced by one high school kid who, though this remarkable teacher, might begin to think, "Hey physics is actually sweet," what would you say? - tomatell, on 10/12/2007, -2/+23I miss him. He is a good bongo player.... Always with lots of curiosity.
- warpdragon, on 10/12/2007, -0/+17Try "Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman" too.
- Lewie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+16Who dugg you down? He WAS a good bongo player! If I recall correctly, he could play 12 beats with one hand, and 13 with the other, per time period.
- zifnab, on 10/12/2007, -1/+15One of the greatest physicists, no doubt.
- XrayCharlie, on 10/12/2007, -1/+11Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. I, too, can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
—Richard Feynman - qazw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9"Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman" is the only Feynman book that I read, but I read it twice and I think I am ready for a third time ( if I can find where I put it... ).
You really don't need to be a matematicien to read that one ( it's a biography ), but he still shares two-three fun mathematical tricks he used to impress his collegue, and believe me, impressing the people who developped the Atom bomb was probably quite a challenge. - sho222, on 10/12/2007, -4/+12good find
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8One of the best teachers out there as well. teaches with an extreme clairity. SImple but not talking down to you.
- lava, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Feynman is absolutely my most favorite person in the world. He proved that you can accomplish huge things and have tons of fun at the same time. All his books have made me want to lead a more interesting life.
- mcbean, on 10/12/2007, -3/+10Of which 137 have been dugg to the front page, a pretty nice ratio which tells of quality submissions. Compare that to the101/1405 of Tysonhy, another fairly prolific submitter.
- ThomasCJohnson, on 10/12/2007, -6/+12I love this man. He was crazy, did drugs, went to strip clubs... everything. He's proof that drugs do nothing to a great mind.
- DEFSMAC, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9so he needs a hobby man. sheesh, get off his back and stop obsessing over him. it's just a website.
- csyberblue, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6just got finished watching it. It was a good video, I especially liked his viewpoint on teaching, which is "I don't know how to teach, I just try and hook people's imaginations in different ways and hope not to bore everybody at the same time", and how he doesn't like taking care of administrative matters, so he tells everybody that he's "irresponsible" in order to get out of doing it.
- skimitar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I'd recommend the book "Genius" by James Gleick - excellent biography of Mr Feynman
- kden, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6I personally enjoyed one of his books, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?" I'm definetely going to look into his other books as well.
- RobotCitizen, on 10/12/2007, -2/+7Inquisitiveness is cool. Feynman was cool. Dugg.
- Blizzardman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Encyclopedia as a childrens book, genius :).
- Lewie, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I love Richard Feynman! I read his "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" and "6 Easy Pieces". I have yet to get to his "6 Not-so-easy Pieces".
Absolutely brilliant! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Yay, We're using his lectures for physics in the honors series. He's pretty good at explaining quantum mechanics, his lectures are legend. Compared to that ***** ass Six Ideas that made physics crap...
- diggerphelps, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Feynman also invented the term "bling-bling."
http://books.google.com/books?q=bling-bling&id=yC90I97b_ssC&vid=ISBN0393316041&dq=feynman&ie=UTF-8 - maybememe, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"See that bird, what type of bird is that?... But once you know the name of that bird in all of the languages ever created, you'll know nothing about the bird... lets look at the bird and what it's doing"
Do you know the difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something?
Obtain a birds eye view.....
The method of learning above that Richard Feynmen describes his father teaching him in the film, looks to me, awfully similar to the methods eastern parents descbribe in the following article summary of a study which I saved from last year...
But before that, it also reminds me of the methods that General Semantics tries to imploy.
http://vanparecon.resist.ca/Bryan/general_semantics.html
Westerners and Easterners see the world differently
* 22:00 22 August 2005
* NewScientist.com news service
* Zeeya Merali
Chinese and American people see the world differently – literally. While Americans focus on the central objects of photographs, Chinese individuals pay more attention to the image as a whole, according to psychologists at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, US.
“There is plenty of anecdotal evidence suggesting that Western and East Asian people have contrasting world-views,” explains Richard Nisbett, who carried out the study. “Americans break things down analytically, focusing on putting objects into categories and working out what rules they should obey,” he says.
By contrast, East Asians have a more holistic philosophy, looking at objects in relation to the whole. “Figuratively, Americans see things in black and white, while East Asians see more shades of grey,” says Nisbett. “We wanted to devise an experiment to see if that translated to a literal difference in what they actually see.”
The researchers tracked the eye-movements of two groups of students while they looked at photographs. One group contained American-born graduates of European descent and the other was comprised of Chinese-born graduate students who came to the US after their undergraduate degrees.
Each picture showed a striking central image placed in a realistic background, such as a tiger in a jungle. They found that the American students spent longer looking at the central object, while the Chinese students’ eyes tended to dart around, taking in the context.
Harmony versus goals
Nisbett and his colleagues believe that this distinctive pattern has developed because of the philosophies of these two cultures. “Harmony is a central idea in East Asian philosophy, and so there is more emphasis on how things relate to the whole,” says Nisbett. “In the West, by contrast, life is about achieving goals.”
Psychologists watching American and Japanese families playing with toys have also noted this difference. “An American mother will say: ‘Look Billy, a truck. It’s shiny and has wheels.’ The focus is on the object,” explains Nisbett. By contrast, Japanese mothers stress context saying things like, “I push the truck to you and you push it to me. When you throw it at the wall, the wall says ‘ouch’."
Nisbett also cites language development in the cultures. “To Westerners it seems obvious that babies learn nouns more easily. But while this is the case in the West, studies show that Korean and Chinese children pick up verbs – which relate objects to each other - more easily.
“Nisbett’s work is interesting and suggestive,” says John Findlay, a psychologist specialising in human visual attention at Durham University, UK. “It’s always difficult to put an objective measure on cultural differences, but this group have made a step towards that.”
Nisbett hopes that his work will change the way the cultures view each other. “Understanding that there is a real difference in the way people think should form the basis of respect. - shiftt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3not entirely, he did very little drugs and mentioned several times in his autobiography that he doesnt want to do drugs because he would hate to "ruin his thinking machine" that he enjoys so much
not to be misintepreted, he never said anything bad about drugs.. just that he doesnt want to risk losing his own curiosity - H2SO4, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5Calculus at 13..............damn!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Here's the poster: http://www.fotuva.org/newsletters/images/FeynSFclose.jpg
- cheeseman204, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2A good book about some of his stories is Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! Theirs another one but i havent read it
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0393316041/102-9737497-2215362?v=glance&n=283155 - mrpink.137, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3"Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman" is easily one of the top ten best books ever written...I could read it a million times and still be amazed by his life.
- OrangeJuice, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Anyone out there who is into security should check out the stories on Feynman cracking safes around Los Alamos in "Surely You Must Be Joking, Mr. Feynman!"
- lagrange, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Imagine if television were still put to such good use today.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Dang that was a flippin' sweet intro.
- rodrigo74, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Thanks for finding this..Feynman was one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and although I am not a scientist, he inspired and inspires me a lot.
Too bad most people associate the profession of scientist with the crazy-looking, weird-talking type of guys like Einstein, instead of the pragmatic, approachable and down-to-Earth guys like Feynman. - substrate, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1He did try drugs but he wasn't personally pro-drug. He in general was an abstainer from drugs and alcohol but he was also adventurous.So he tried LSD, tried pot and tried alcohol but didn't like what they did to his brain and stopped. When he tried beer he realized that he was in danger of losing control and quit. He still went to bars and strip clubs though, women were his drug of choice.
- oneoffmanmental, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Ahhhh...old school Horizon from the BBC before it started caring about ratings.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1What you just heard was the first chapter of the book "The Pleasure of Finding Things out"... Link to Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=ekscompany-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2Fgp%2Fproduct%2F0738203491%2F
- rogermoore, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3"The honours are unreal to me..."
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Infinity(1996)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116635/ - rogermoore, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4How can I digg this 100 times?
- DSPGeek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Gazw, those mathematical tricks are like doing a bank shot in pool - tough at first, but easier with practice. Try working things without a calculator a day or two each week. It'll be like going to the gym, painful & tedious to begin, but eventually you'll start seeing patterns in the numbers.. I learned to do it because I'm too lazy to find my calculator on my desk, and most of the time close is good enough anyway. Seven digits of precision is for NASA, not carpentry.
- shiftt, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1I just purchased that one and can't wait to read it
- tktk, on 10/12/2007, -7/+7Here's the condensed version...
Born May 11, 1918.
Shared a Nobel Prize in 1965.
Funny guy.
Died February 15, 1988. - claudio85, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0Feynman is my favourite physicist of all time. This interview, although great, doesn't reflect all his personality. Check this: http://claudio85.serveblog.net/?p=62
- ThomasCJohnson, on 10/12/2007, -5/+3Could you be any more random? Bahahaha
- JohnSimpson, on 10/12/2007, -3/+0Feynman says one type of friction.
Heathcote says two.
Heathcote is never wrong.
Therefore, two types of friction. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -4/+0
That's where he kept his porn collection. - kalphegor, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1flames war
Feynman Laugh About Moline Entertaining Sub_Way Acting Ridiculous - TenebrousX, on 10/12/2007, -14/+8@dirtyfratboy
pwned - dirtyfratboy, on 10/12/2007, -21/+15You are about as entertaining as a child's inflatable punching toy. You bop it, it springs back, you bop it again and you forget it ever existed. It slowly deflates in an unused corner, then one day you throw it away.
- dirtyfratboy, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3No.
- ThomasCJohnson, on 10/12/2007, -10/+1You said "yes" a bit ago. =O
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+0
You ***** must be the life of the party.
BTW, I hear he did amatuer porn in his spare time. -
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