All posts tagged: Paradox

Is there a word for the Wiki page for the Ship of Theseus paradox?

Published by skeptic

Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com The ship comes in We asked, you answered. Feedback wondered what adjective would best describe the Wikipedia page for the Ship of Theseus paradox. As a reminder, the paradox asks whether it’s the same ship if every single component has been replaced, and the Wiki page for it has been edited so much that nothing of the original remains, making it an exemplar of the thing it describes. Sifting through the resulting mailbag, we see a great many suggestions, ranging from Tim Moulsley’s “autoparadigm” to Bryn Glover’s “autocausative”. Martin Bastone was one of many readers who took inspiration from the British comedy Only Fools and Horses, in which the dim-witted road sweeper Trigger gets a medal for saving the council money, thanks to his having used the same broom for 20 years – with the minor caveat that it has had 17 new heads and 14 new …

The paradox of Trump's GOP

Published by Sam Flores

Older Republicans are in sync with the president on foreign policy and other issues, but the rising generations of conservatives are not. He can solve that. Source link

The Sensitivity Paradox | Psychology Today

Published by Jenni Sidey

I was always a big, strong kid, but not a tough one. That was partly because my well-meaning father, who was a pacifist, essentially told me to turn the other cheek: “Just walk away,” was his advice for handling bullies. Which was fine, but didn’t much help in the dog-eat-dog world of my primary-school playground. Being a big, sensitive boy made me a magnet for the gang of kids who terrorised me, making my 11th year a truly horrible one. Throughout that awful, traumatic year, I hated my dad for giving me such terrible advice. And I hated my sensitivity, wishing I could be like those tough kids, who were always the bullies, never the bullied. Throughout my childhood, I longed to be something other than I was: harder, cooler, more confident. Not the insecure, introverted child and adolescent fate had deemed me to be. As I trained in psychotherapy and began seeing clients, this jaundiced view of my sensitivity gradually changed. I came to welcome the gifts my highly sensitive brain and nervous system …

The no-go zone paradox: Chornobyl’s wildlife thrives amid pro-nuclear shift | Nuclear power

Published by Sam Flores

Forty years on from the world’s worst nuclear disaster, Chornobyl is still contaminated with almost half the caesium-137 that exploded from the Unit 4 reactor in 1986, as well other hazards such as plutonium, tritium and americium. But according to some experts, the long-term effects on nature may be less than if the area had been left to humans, resulting in unexpected consequences in an environment left to its own devices. The reminder of the protracted fallout from Chornobyl was made ahead of Sunday’s anniversary, which coincides with renewed lobbying for nuclear power and a rise in fears about atomic brinkmanship due to the oil crisis and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The latter conflict continues to threaten Chornobyl and make the contamination worse. It was revealed last month that the giant containment structure around the most radioactive area inside the defunct plant will need €500m (£434m) worth of repairs after a strike by a Russian drone. Wild Przewalski horses graze in a forest inside the Chornobyl exclusion zone, Ukraine. Photograph: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP …

Freedom, Secularism and the Loneliness Paradox

Published by Sam Flores

We are freer than any generation before us. We can leave our hometowns, abandon religion, cut ties with toxic family members and build lives wherever we want. But are we all built for an independent social life? Across much of the secular world, loneliness is rising. The very freedoms that liberated us from rigid social structures may also have dismantled the communities that once sustained us. Modern secular societies face a paradox: The liberation from inherited communities has given individuals unprecedented autonomy, but it has also dismantled many of the social structures that once protected people from isolation. Until recently, most people had at least some kind of built-in socializing structures – and one of them was their town’s religious congregation. The freedom to choose whether you want to keep contact with your family, or whether you wish to reproduce or not was practically non-existent or not considered. Now we can cut contact with toxic family members. We can choose to not attend any religious congregation. We can work from home and avoid “office politics.” …

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 2)

Published by Jenni Sidey

The Global Expansion of Chinese Crypto Capital and the Systemic Collapse of Community Culture In Part 1, I examined how China and the United States have gradually diverged onto two fundamentally different regulatory and institutional paths in the Web3 era. While the American model remains anchored in token-based financialization and dollar-linked stablecoins, China has deliberately removed the coin from the centre of its Web3 strategy, repositioning blockchain as an infrastructure for governable data, industrial coordination, and sovereign digital currency. Next, we’ll turn to the global political and cultural implications of Chinese crypto capital. Against this backdrop of domestic regulatory restructuring, a striking paradox emerges: even as China tightens control over crypto activity at home, capital and actors with Chinese backgrounds continue to expand aggressively in overseas markets. The clearest examples are the reported cooperation between Binance and the Trump family, as well as Justin Sun’s appearance at a White House dinner as a major token holder. Whatever these interactions may ultimately signify in legal, compliance, or political-symbolic terms, they at least produce a powerful visual …

Micro Softy 74: The Cretan Paradox & Logical Illusions

Published by Jenni Sidey

There are optical illusions and auditory illusions. This week’s Micro Softy concerns logical illusions. Two optical illusions are shown in Figure 1. On the left, the “Mad poiuyt” appeared on the cover of MAD Magazine in March 1965. On the right, stairs repeat themselves in an impossible illusion. If you walk clockwise, you are always going downstairs forever. This staircase was used in the surreal art of M.C. Escher. Figure 1: Two optical illusions. / WikipediaLeft, WikipediaRight. The Shepard-Risset glissando is an auditory illusion where the pitch of a sound appears to continuously rise or fall indefinitely. Christopher Nolan’s films like Dunkirk and The Dark Knight used it to heighten the sense of dread or relentless motion. It can be used to create the illusion of an endless climb or descent, or to signify a special event, as in Super Mario 64’s endless staircase. A tone that decreased in pitch forever is not possible. The Shepard-Risset glissando is an auditory illusion. Logical Illusions This week’s Micro Softy is about logical illusions. Here’s a classic example. Epimenides, a 6th-century BC philosopher from Crete, reportedly said: “All Cretans are liars.” The Apostle Paul repeated this claim in the New Testament book of Titus. “One of Crete’s own prophets has said it: `Cretans are always liars …’ ” [Titus 1:12] The logic illusion paradox arises when we consider that Epimenides himself is a Cretan. Suppose …

Physicists use pulses of light in 37 dimensions to prove quantum paradox

Published by Jenni Sidey

A puzzle with only three moves may sound simple. In quantum physics, it can still break classical logic. That is the heart of a new experiment led by physicist Zhenghao Liu and colleagues at the Technical University of Denmark. Writing in Science Advances, the team built what they describe as a three-context Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger, or GHZ-type, paradox. Then they reproduced its statistics in a 37-dimensional optical system. As a result, the outcome sharpened one of quantum theory’s strangest claims: what you can say about a system depends on how you choose to measure it. In ordinary life, measurement seems passive. You check a speed, a weight, a temperature, and assume the thing you measured already had that value. However, quantum mechanics does not let you keep that picture. The study focused on contextuality, the idea that even when a set of measurements is compatible, you still cannot assign fixed preexisting values without specifying the full measurement context. The GHZ paradox has long served as one of the cleanest ways to expose that tension. It sets up …

Embracing the Warrior-Guardian Paradox in Modern Policing

Published by Jenni Sidey

Few debates in law enforcement generate more heat — and less light — than the question of whether police officers should see themselves as warriors or guardians. Advocates on one side argue that the warrior identity is essential: that officers who hesitate expose themselves and innocent people to catastrophic harm. Advocates on the other argue that the warrior mindset poisons community trust, and that the guardian model is the only path to legitimacy in a democratic society. Both sides have valid and justified perspectives. And both sides are incomplete. The warrior and the guardian are not competing philosophies between which a department must choose. They are complementary capacities every officer needs — and every agency must develop, sustain, and honor equally. The question is not which mindset belongs in policing. It is how to build professionals skilled enough to know which one a given moment demands, and courageous enough to deploy it fully. The tension between these orientations is embedded in the founding DNA of modern policing. When Sir Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police …

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All posts tagged: Paradox

Is there a word for the Wiki page for the Ship of Theseus paradox?

The paradox of Trump's GOP

The Sensitivity Paradox | Psychology Today

The no-go zone paradox: Chornobyl’s wildlife thrives amid pro-nuclear shift | Nuclear power

Freedom, Secularism and the Loneliness Paradox

The Paradox of China’s Crypto Regulation and Capital Going Global (Part 2)

Micro Softy 74: The Cretan Paradox & Logical Illusions

Physicists use pulses of light in 37 dimensions to prove quantum paradox

Embracing the Warrior-Guardian Paradox in Modern Policing