Tag Archives: science
The Outer Fringe
Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946 by Hermann Hagedorn has been really fun and informative. In this excerpt, he shared horticulturist Luther Burbank’s concept of life, the universe, and everything: “Life,” Burbank wrote, “is not material… the life-stream is not a substance. Life is a force– electrical, magnetic, a quality, not a quantity.” He saw …
The Empathy Circuit
via JoshKornbluth.com.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” ~Stephen Jay Gould
Solitary Wanderer
Excerpted from The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, © 1957: It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations …
Poles
There’s a North Pole and a South Pole, but there’s not an East Pole or a West Pole. It would be very hard to give someone directions if you were standing at the North Pole, because every direction would be South. If you took a compass to the North Pole, it would point South. Magnetic …
A crystal to precipitate
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: All real scientists exist on the frontier. Even the least ambitious among them deal with the unknown, if only one step beyond the unknown. The best among them move deep into a wilderness region where they know almost nothing, where the very tools and …
The Narrow Confines
“One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. With this negative motive …
Probe Vertically, See Horizontally
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: The greatest challenge of science, its art, lies in asking an important question and framing it in a way that allows it to be broken into manageable pieces, into experiments that can be conducted that ultimately lead to answers. To this requires a certain …
A Kind of Perceived Truth
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: Indeed, methodology matters more than anything else. Methodology subsumes, for example, Thomas Khun’s well-known theory of how science advances. Kuhn gave the word “paradigm” wide usage by arguing that at any given point in time, a particular paradigm, a kind of perceived truth, dominates …
Charm
The BBC recently posted an article on the science of being charming. Here, in summary, is how you do it: Smile Arch your eyebrows Mirror other’s body language Feign interest in their lives Maybe it’s an English thing, but it was interesting to me that they just assume you’ll have to pretend to be interested …
