{"id":4683,"date":"2012-10-28T15:45:16","date_gmt":"2012-10-28T19:45:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4683"},"modified":"2012-10-28T15:45:16","modified_gmt":"2012-10-28T19:45:16","slug":"the-microzen-a-unit-of-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4683","title":{"rendered":"The microzen: a unit of enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier today one of my commenters <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=4679&#038;cpage=1#comment-390113\">caused me to realize<\/a>  that it would be entertaining to try to define a unit for the intensity of &#8220;aha!&#8221; experiences &#8211; moments of sudden insight.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>In honor of said commenter (who, synchronistically enough, signs himself &#8220;Foo&#8221;) I define the &#8220;microzen&#8221; (&mu;z) as follows: the amount of enlightement achieved when one realizes that &#8220;spinward&#8221; and &#8220;antispinward&#8221; are useful terms on planets as well as ringworlds.  Because, well, global atmospheric circulation patterns &#8211; the context was a discussion of the incidence of cyclonic storms.<\/p>\n<p>(I&#8217;d have preferred &#8220;microsatori&#8221;, but &mu;s is taken.)<\/p>\n<p>Of course, there&#8217;s a scaling problem here. Even if you have a good way to estimate relative magnitudes, you need <em>two<\/em> fixpoints to define a linear scale.  (You in the back there just shut up about logarithmic already, I&#8217;m having to wave my hands hard enough as it is.)  I therefore arbitrarily set 100 &mu;z as the amount of aha required for somebody to write <cite>The Cathedral and the Bazaar<\/cite>. <\/p>\n<p>Now, I hear you out there saying &#8220;You fool!  That&#8217;s entirely too ill-defined!&#8221; But here&#8217;s my clever plan:  if people have broadly similar intuitions about relative degrees of aha, <em>we can crowdsource the problem!<\/em>  That is, we ask a bunchaton of people to consider some specific enlightenment experience &#8211; like, say, grokking how anonymous lambdas work in a functional-programming language &#8211; and rate that relative to our 1&mu;z and 100&mu;z scale pegs.<\/p>\n<p>There you have it.  Comments are open; let the crowdsourcing begin.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier today one of my commenters caused me to realize that it would be entertaining to try to define a unit for the intensity of &#8220;aha!&#8221; experiences &#8211; moments of sudden insight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4683"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4684,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4683\/revisions\/4684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}