Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014

Tenoke

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

This article proposes a plausible mathematical model for the subject perception of (long) time spans:

http://www.stochastik.uni-freiburg.de/~rueschendorf/papers/BrussRueSep3:Geron.pdf

This is interesting for the following reasons:

It is general and robust to definitions of time perception in particular it doesn't rely on a specific measurement or definition of events.
It is analogous to model of perception of other stimuli.
The derived relationship suggests time perception being logarithmic with age and thus at age a time seems to proceed only at a rate of 1/a
A corallary would be that if you could become immortal you'd probably be bored to death.
An escape hatch to this is that you'd possibly could increase the rate of new events for older people.

A corallary would be that if you could become immortal you'd probably be bored to death.

And I think this points in the other direction- I think this suggests that 'a century is but a blink in the eye in the life of an elf' might actually be accurate. You throw some dwarves in the dungeon, then go about your normal routine, and then say 'oh, didn't we just capture some dwarves?' and it turns out that you've done your weekly routine a few thousand times since then.

That is, if you're ten times as old, you only expect a tenth the number of 'new events' duri... (read more)

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Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014

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You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

6

6

Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014

6

You know the drill - If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.

6