From Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History: Armed with impressive arrays of accurate instruments, [Alexander von] Humboldt demonstrated that accumulating meticulous measurements could reveal patterns in nature’s vagaries, and so impose mathematical order on variable phenomena such as air pressure, magnetism, and plant distribution. Figure 33 [above] shows his visual argument that there [...]
From Patricia Fara’s Science: A Four Thousand Year History. She takes a historical and comparative approach to explore the diversity of scientific experience (similar to Karen Armstrong’s A History of God). If you assume that todays science, along with its technological applications, represents the summit of human achievement, then Islamic philosophers do indeed appear to have [...]
The following quote is from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. (The John mentioned is the protagonist’s buddy who wants to escape modern technological life via a motorcycle he deigns to tune-up): Precision instruments are designed to achieve an idea, dimensional precision, whose perfection is impossible. There is no perfectly shaped [...]
The following is from the conclusion of the Axemaker’s Gift by James Burke and Robert Ornstein: The first step may be to recognize that we can use our technology as it has been used time and again through history. We can use it to change minds, but this time for our own reasons in our [...]
2nd rate band’s new single appears on bittorrent sites, band releases press release decrying leak, sleuthing ensues…turns out the band’s manager leaked the track himself. Damning on its own, but the interesting part is the forensic sleuthing that led to outing the guilty party: With some help of a user in the community, we tracked [...]
The Santa Clause psp Okay. You’ve got nature—neurons, brain chemicals, hormones, and of course, at the bottom of the cereal box, genes. And then there’s nurture, all those environmental breezes gusting about. And the biggest cliche in this field is how it is meaningless to talk about nature or nurture, only about their interaction. And [...]
