Hrvoje's blog

 I continued to follow Michael Levin on youtube,  Michael Levin & Matthew Segall discuss Meaning, Matter & Memory in Developmental Biology  and started to notice a rather strange comment repeated by that brilliant scientist. When people ask "Where is the information that controlls morphogenesis written?", he adds in that context the following question "Where does the shape of the bell curve of normal distribution that emerges in stochastic processes (like when dropping marbles into Galton board) come from?", trying to say that not everything has to be written somewhere, "we get some things for free from mathematics". And this is true, we get so many things like that, that is a whole point of applied mathematics, for example a trajectory of a stone thrown by hand is a parabola, it may degenerate to a line if we throw it vertically, and there is always a slight air resistance, but if we disregard that, we can ask the same question: "Where does p...

  Have you ever wondered what mathematical abstraction describes a computer program most adequately? If you consider it a black box, then the right answer is probably a function, because from the outside a program appears as a mapper of some input data into some output data. If you consider how it does what it does, then some additional abstractions may come into mind, like an algorithm, because a program is a sequence of instructions, non linear, in a sense that it can make loops, branching, forking, spawning, calling (sub)functions in the main function, etc. But it always presents a decomposition of the main task into smaller steps, subtasks, so, this decomposition is the essence of what an algorithm is. Obviously there must be some smallest steps then, that need no decomposition in order to be performed, or rather, that cannot be decomposed to anything more basic/fundamental on a certain computer. These are either machine instructions, or instructions of the higher level program...

Disregarding the sensationalistic title of the BBC Earth video on youtube, I was very impressed by the work of scientists from The Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University, described here  Chimp vs Human! | Memory Test | BBC Earth  .  First thing that came to my mind was the question how did they manage to do it? Note that a chimpanzee does not have to actually understand the meaning of each particular symbol with respect to integer quantity it represents, in order to perform this task, but it has to understand exactly and precisely the order of symbols. If I were to teach a chimpanzee the order of arabic numerals, by using a computer with a touch screen and a reward deliverer interface, my program would first display the numerals in a fully ordered fashion that is easily followed even by humans, which are surprisingly inferior to chimpanzees in this exercise. For example, in a horizontal line from left to right in a strictly ascending order, if touched sequentia...

My view is that there are a few fundamentally different methods by which people try to investigate reality and conclude something about it, that they hope is true. The produced statement is usually expressed in a natural language, however not always is that necessarily the best way of conveying the truth. These are science, philosophy, religion and art. Religion is based on faith, while science is based on doubt. For instance, one can religiously believe that his wife will not cheat on him, regardless of temptations, because she loves him, but he will probably not conduct experiments conciously to test that theory. Or, one can religiously believe that his parents always had his best interests in mind, when they made desicions for him. Or that his children will be there for him when he will need them, just as he was there when they needed him. Or that they will contribute to society by doing their jobs, just as much as he did all his life. Doubting such things probably is not a good way...

  Tražeći bezuspješno po Istri adekvatnu nekretninu već duže vremena kako bih je kupio za odmor i eventualno iznajmljivanje, angažirao sam pritom poveći broj posredničkih agencija. Kako god bi neku nekretninu koja me zainteresirala nudila neka nova agencija s kojom dotad nisam poslovao, ja bih s njenim agentom zaduženim za dotični predmet sklopio posrednički ugovor. Pri tome sam se susreo s izvjesnim brojem ponuda koje su meni kao laiku djelovale nezakonito, te s činjenicom da velika većina agencija, negdje između 98 i 99 posto ukupnog broja, barem onih u Istri i Zagrebu, posreduje u predmetima kao agent obje strane. Budući da sam u tome vidio sukob interesa, koji je umjesto iznimke postao pravilo koje korumpira jednu cijelu privrednu djelatnost, uzrokujući direktno spomenute nezakonitosti, to me ponukalo da malo proučim sljedeće tekstove, sljedećim redom: Zakon o posredovanju u prometu nekretnina   Zakon o sprječavanju sukoba interesa   SUKOB INTERESA U PRIVATNOM SEKTORU...