Cognitive Engineering

The observant among us will have noted that 2023 ended on a Sunday. For those who believe Sunday marks the end of the week, this seems like a logical day to end the year. But why do we find these types of phenomena satisfying? Is it slightly obsessive or should we strive for this symmetry in our daily lives? The bigger question might be: is it even possible to produce neatness in our messy world? In this week’s episode, we discuss neatness. We debate which day is the first day of the week, and discuss the universal three-act structure, epicycles, special relativity, Kolmogorov complexity, prime numbers, crosswords, emergent complexity and the metric system. Finally, we share our best and worst attempts to impose neatness on the world around us. A few things we mentioned in this podcast: - Kolmogorov Complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity - Sabbath https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat - A Mathematician’s Apology: https://archive.org/details/AMathematiciansApology-G.h.Hardy For