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Bees, ants, space and algorithm

In 2011, Science Daily reported on a study done at Queen Mary University of London and published in Biology Letters. The study examined the foraging strategies of bumblebees and found that “after extensive training (80 foraging bouts and at least 640 flower visits), bees reduced their flight distances and prioritized shortest possible routes.” The bees […]

Pollock, fractal expressionism and a mathematical thought

In a blog back in January, I referenced a talk given by David Deutsch in which he made the argument that, while empiricism has been the basis of science, empiricism alone is inadequate because scientific theories explain the seen in terms of the unseen.

What we see, in all these cases, bears no resemblance to […]

Finger counting, finger gnosia and cerebral structures

In June The Guardian posted an interesting piece on finger counting and numbers. The main content of the article concerns the work of cognitive scientists Andrea Bender and Sieghard Beller which explores the cultural diversity in finger counting. It tells us that if asked to use you hands to count to 10, these variations will […]

Birds and the number 0

I’ve been working on an article that has me thinking about neuroscientifc studies on the cerebral representations of magnitude and it happened to be brought to my attention today that Irene Pepperberg spoke at the 2012 Francis Crick Memorial Conference on Consciousness in Animals.

Pepperberg is famous for having worked for many years with […]

Anosognosia, Consciousness and Mathematics

In last weeks post, I reported on the work of a computer scientist (Jürgen Schmidhuber’s artificial curiosity) and neuroscientist Gerald Edelman. I would like to follow-up a bit with more about Edelman’s work and perspective, in part because I was captivated by a story he told (in more than one venue) to illustrate the fact […]

Compression, meaning, and mathematics

One of the more interesting applications of algorithmic action can be seen in Jürgen Schmidhuber’s work on artificial curiosity.

Schmidhuber has been building what he calls ‘artificial scientists and artists’ that possess an algorithmic mechanism for motivating invention. He provides a brief and fairly straightforward description of his creative machines in the transcript of a […]

Seeing, dreaming and mathematics

I was struck by the clarity of statements made about perception in a recent Mind Hacks blog. When Tom Stafford reports on a talk he just gave in Berlin he says this:

Perception is the production of meaning, not the production of images. Our associations and experience are incorporated in the act of perception, so […]

Spider webs and a random walk in software space

Yesterday I happened upon a Huffington Post blog from Mario Livio. For anyone who has been following my blog, it will come as no surprise that this piece, about the surprising similarity between spider webs and computer generated cosmic webs, caught my attention. After showing us a few, Livio says:

For an astrophysicist, perhaps the […]

The solstice, archaeoastronomy and mathematics

Given the arrival of the summer solstice and this post on the EarthSky website, I decided to write a little bit about what prehistoric monuments (like Stonehenge) suggest to me about some of the roots of mathematics.

With a photograph to support the claim, the EarthSky post tells us:

If you stood inside the Stonehenge […]

Foraging for food, remembering, and mathematics

On April 16 Scientificamerican.com reported on research that links hunting for words with foraging for food.

Our brains may have evolved to forage for some kinds of memories in the same way, shifting our attention from one cluster of stored information to another depending on what each patch has to offer. Recently, Thomas Hills of […]