When you look at the photo above, perhaps you see : 1) A delicious-looking much-loved chocolate bar renowned for its unique bubbly texture. or 2) A nightmarish and disgusting depiction of tightly clustered holes. If your reaction leans more towards the latter, it’s possible that you are suffering from trypophobia. Which is (currently being) defined […]
Tag: holes
When Absence of Evidence Is Evidence of Absence
“Identifying patterns in the world requires noticing not only unusual occurrences, but also unusual absences.” – inform professor Anne S. Hsu and colleagues Andy Horng, Thomas L. Griffiths and Nick Chater in a new paper for the journal Cognitive Science. “We examined how people learn from absences, manipulating the extent to which an absence is […]
Fitness: round holes and square holes, pegged
Wolfram Mathworld bores down into a much-discussed-by-others-but-usually-idly question about pegs and holes: The answer to the question “which fits better, a round peg in a square hole, or a square peg in a round hole?” can be interpreted as asking which is larger, the ratio of the area of a circle to its circumscribed square, or the area of thesquare to its circumscribed circle? […]
Holes in donuts – the philosophical implications (part 2)
In 2001, professor Achille C. Varzi, of Columbia University, New York, very probably became the first philosopher to author a paper focusing specifically on the ramifications of holes in donuts (that’s ‘doughnuts’ in the UK), as we reported. But the paper wasn’t, in the literal sense, the last word on donut holes. In 2012 the subject […]
Filling a Gap in our Knowledge of a Fear of Holes
This research paper is one of the first to make repeated use of the word “trypophobia”: “Fear of Holes,” Geoff G. Cole [pictured here] and Arnold J. Wilkins, Psychological Science, epub August 27, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Essex, UK, explain: “Phobias […]
Holes in Swiss Cheese – a century of investigation
The formation of holes (a.k.a. ‘eyes’) in Swiss Cheese has been the focus of intense scientific scrutiny for more than a century. For a state-of-the art review of the literature – as it was around 100 years ago – see the work of William Mansfield Clark, [pictured right] late DeLamar professor of physiological chemistry at […]
Heidegger meets Macaroni in New York State
• Which came first, the hole or the macaroni? • And what would Heidegger have had to say about it? These questions have been examined in some detail by professor Gregg Lambert of Syracuse University, New York state. As readers may know (via his personal website) “Professor Lambert is internationally renowned for his scholarly writings…” […]
Fillable Entities: Do Holes Exist?
“Do holes really exist? And if so, what are they?” These questions were posed by professors Roberto Casati and Achille C. Varzi in their 263 page book on the subject of ‘Holes and Other Superficialities’ (The MIT Press, 1994). And considerable steps were made towards answers. The duo took a comprehensive look into the myriad […]
Almost nothings
For many philosophers, the scholarly debate around holes began in earnest in 1970, with Lewis and Lewis’s now classic article ‘Holes’ (Australasian Journal of Philosophy 48: 206–212.) The authors presented their paper in a highly unusual format – that of an imaginary discussion between two philosophers, called Argle and Bargle, who are pondering the holes in […]