Now starting to read Tenth of a Second by
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Fascinating. This book talks a lot about why 1/10th s was such a big deal. There was a whole mildly crackpot kinda-pseudo-science movement to study the “personal equation” of individuals from 1790s to WW1. Kinda like “cognitive bias” research today.
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Apparently started with attempts to account for observer bias in precise astronomical instruments, turned into a general metrology crisis, ended in Taylorism, Jungian psychology, etc.
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Apparently when Gauss invented least-squares, it was in part to solve this problem, and there was lot of debate about its validity. Karl Pearson developed his chi-square test etc to address that. Never knew this context.
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Reaction time studies on the order of 1/10th s was the foundation of all pre-modern psychology looks like. The whole thing strikes me as similar to phrenology or handwriting analysis for personality, etc. Empirical bullshit science is the best kind of bullshit science.
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And yeah, I think cognitive bias stuff will be considered the weird bullshit science of our era imho.
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This book is written in a sort of stream of consciousness mode. It’s impossible to keep track of the vast cast of characters who come and go, with little background or introduction. The author writes as though to fellow scholars of these obscure archives. But it sorta works.
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The benefit is you get a sense of impressionistic immersion into the 0.1s milieu. Fly on wall style. Forgotten trivia is mixed in with glimpses of historic things like the discovery of Neptune and the invention of photography and cinema.
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One of the first applications of high speed photography was in figuring out that horses had all 4 feet in the air at some times. That was not well known and earlier paintings showed 1-2 feet on the ground at all times.
The book cover shows Muybridge's high speed pics of horses.
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