1–20 of 31
Play as Progress: Play is a way of turning children into adults. Play is valuable because it educates and develops the cognitive capacities of human or animal youth. Examples: All forms of children's play and animal play Play as Fate: Human lives and play are controlled by fate in the form of destiny, gods, atoms…
So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract…
Words are fundamentally conceptual—although they are physical objects, they represent something ideational. Just giving students definitions of words or having them evaluate the context of word use does not fully use the brain’s patterning style of identifying information. Th e value of word pattern sorting extends…
Every science overlaps with others: they are two continuous branches off a single trunk. He who composes an opus does not enter abruptly into his subject, does not close himself strictly within it, does not leave it abruptly: he is obliged to anticipate terrain adjoining his; its consequences often take him onto…
In psychological research on problem-solving, sometimes the game of Tic-Tac-Toe is employed, which, though very simple to learn and play, still offers sufficient problems to the investigator in that it is not at all clear what heuristics are used by the subjects, except avoiding the winning move of the opponent. The…
Physicists love to think about systems that take only a little information to describe. So when they get a system that takes a lot of information to describe, they use a trick called 'statistical mechanics', where you try to ignore most of this information and focus on a few especially important variables. For…
The truth is that a life science PhD leaves you poorly prepared to get a job doing anything else: 1) Grad programs put very little emphasis on developing writing skills – you maybe write 4-5 documents (proposal, 2-3 papers, plus thesis) over seven years of grad school, with very little feedback on quality of the…
There is a little local exomemory that opens up while Isidore studies the structure. It describes Eternitas as an ‘experiment in transforming exomemory data directly into architecture and livable spaces.’ The Oubliette is full of similar art projects – indeed, many of Isidore’s fellow students work on considerably…
When I am reading Hamlet I often develop an urge to tell people about it, as if the Melancholy Dane's history had heretofore been classified as a top secret. I am bursting with information about Hamlet, so filled am I by the massive "evidence" presented by Shakespeare. So I sit down at my writing table and begin to…
The century of biology upon which we are now well embarked is no matter of trivialities. It is a movement of really heroic dimensions, one of the great episodes in man's intellectual history. The scientists who are carrying the movement forward talk in terms of nucleo-proteins, of ultracentrifuges, of biochemical…
The goal of this new manual, as with all previous editions, is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology. While DSM has been described as a “Bible” for the field, it is, at best, a dictionary, creating a set of labels and defining each. The strength of each of the editions of DSM has been…
Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our gaze—I mean the universe—but we cannot understand if we do not first learn the language and grasp the symbols in which it is written. The book is written in the mathematical language, and the symbols are triangles, circles and Other geometrical…
Everything is made of atoms. That is the key hypothesis. The most important hypothesis in all of biology, for example, is that everything that animals do, atoms do. In other words, there is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to…
The spirit and method of Science arc the direct antithesis of magic. It is science which has produced the "Machine Shop". It is magic that has produced "Finance". In the machine shop. Science rules only in so far as machine processes go: there its control stops. The social control of the Machine Shop lies with the…
I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Generally speaking, people have a very erroneous idea of the type of talent proper to the ideal mechanician. He is not a geometrician who, delving into the theory of movement and the categories of phenomena, formulates new mechanical principles or discovers unsuspected laws of nature.… In most other branches of…
In Nigeria as elsewhere, piracy creates new kinds of archives inconceivable outside of this mode of media reproduction. In markets specializing in wholesale tape duplication, sellers have sprung up specializing in the storage and preservation of different music forms. These sellers maintain substantial archives of…
Environment-controlling buildings gain or lose their energy as "heat o cool" only through their containing surfaces. Spheres contain the most vololume with the least surface—i.e., have the least possible surface-to-volume ratio. Every time we double the diameter of a spherical structure, we in¬ crease its contained…
Museums are, in a way, the cathedrals of the modern world, places where sacred issues are expressed and where people come to reflect on them. A museum is also a kind of bridge between the academy and the public.
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of…