Not the greatest photo in the world, but this little jumping spider was guarding our plants. Note that I changed the photo a bit – the spider was hanging vertically on the wall, but I thought its eyes looked better if I rotated the photo a bit.

Unlike most spiders, jumping spiders have very large, completely front-facing primary eyes and six other eyes that can see in all directions. Pretty freakin’ cool.

Instead of “casual Friday,” I want to make an “acausal Friday,” where all effects are separated from their causes.

This is what will happen to you if you store any of your stuff – mail included – in the so-called “cloud.” Without frequent backup, that is.

And it is also what happens when you buy anything with DRM – one day, you will lose it all.

And I’ll still have all my stuff.

I’m not sure why I was reading this post as it’s about something that doesn’t really interest me, but I am glad I did for this portion and what follows.

I’m frequently confronted with a very seductive, corrupting empirical failing: the tendency to think “that which I cannot measure is not real.”

I see this all the time among the more empirically-minded. Even when statistical tools are used to guard (sort of) against this error of human cognition, people still fall prey to it, and to a huge extent, too.

I’m a weird hybrid – I straddle fields of human endeavor. I’m as comfortable reading a scientific paper in nearly any field as I am an analysis of the transition from Mannerism to Baroque, as interested in art and languages as I am in quantum chromodynamics. It might not be possible these days to be a polymath, but I still try. And sometimes I even succeed. (And no, I don’t enjoy being seen to be smart. I would do this if I were the only person left on earth. Even more so than I do now, as I’d have more time!)

Dancing lightly through so many fields, even if I am not truly skilled in them, I often notice fallacies and errors that others in those fields, having little experience and no knowledge of anything else, do not notice.

This “measurement fallacy” is one I see nearly everywhere. It’s sort of like misogyny that way, alas – once your eyes are open to it, it appears all over the place.

I’m not really sure how to combat it, as you can’t make people see something that is invisible to them. But once you do notice it, it’s just about everywhere.