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Palaeontology is the Aladdin's lamp of the most deserted and lifeless regions of the earth; it touches the rocks and there spring forth in orderly succession the monarchs of the past and the ancient river streams and savannahs wherein they flourished. The rocks usually hide their story in the most difficult and…
All of these people, should they desire, can indicate events and details they remember differently. But there is one unfortunate exception. In 1958, Rosalind Franklin died at the early age of thirty-seven. Since my initial impressions of her, both scientific and personal (as recorded in the early pages of this book)…
“Yes,” Dr. Malone went on, “they know we’re here. They answer back. And here goes the crazy part: you can’t see them unless you expect to. Unless you put your mind in a certain state. You have to be confident and relaxed at the same time. You have to be capable- Where’s that quotation …” She reached into the muddle of…
• The desire to explore • Self-control • Creativity • Verbal communication • Decoding nonverbal communication
Again, in the customs and institutions of schools, academies, colleges, and similar bodies destined for the abode of learned men and the cultivation of learning, everything is found adverse to the progress of science. For the lectures and exercises there are so ordered that to think or speculate on anything out of the…
Man, being the servant and interpreter of Nature, can do and understand so much and so much only as he has observed in fact or in thought of the course of nature. Beyond this he neither knows anything nor can do anything.
Psychologists have tested memory performance in people all over the world and found that those who have completed at least a few years of formal education score higher than those from the same culture and economic status who did not attend school; and the more years completed, the better the performance. Where formal…
The perfect parent, if she (or he) existed, would devote herself full time to the care and teaching of her child. She would begin, even before conception, by shoring up her folic acid reserves and purging her body of any chemical remotely suspect. Once pregnant, she would never touch a drop of alcohol, pump her own…
We mentioned that part of what makes learning language difficult is that languages carve up sounds and different Ianguages carve them up differently. A wide variety of different sounds, with very different spectrograms, will all seem like the same sound to us, and, in turn, that sound will seem sharply different from…
Another great English philosopher, John Locke, posed another classical epistemological problem. What would happen if you miraculously restored the sight of someone who had been blind from birth? Would that person recognize all the objects he had known so intimately through touch, or would he have to painstakingly…
The software, the program. is responsible for organizing hardware, the organism. Yet throughout the process, it is the organism in its various stages of development that has to run the program. In other words, the hardware runs the software, whilst at the same time the software is generating the hardware.
Water is so uniquely favorable to life as we know it, it is hard to imagine life without it. Where did it come from, this planetary wrap of fluid, this liquidy bower? A standard story is that the heat of the young Earth drove hydrogen and oxygen out of chemical combination in minerals like mica, and these atoms then…
On an outcrop of volcanic bedrock near the paath sit half a dozen erratic boulders, some weighining as much as twenty tons, of a coarse-grainned pink granite. Once, I chipped off a sample of)f the rock and followed the bedrock scratches northth, looking for the source. Like an Indian trail of bent twigs. le scratches…
Here are a few second-order instinctual drives some people seem to have that are all opportunities for memes to take advantage of: - Belonging. Humans are gregarious-that is, they like company. There are any number of evolutionary reasons for the existence of this drive, including safety in numbers, economies of…
At this point I want to introduce a distinction between mind viruses that arose spontaneously and ones that were invented by human consciousness. I'll call the naturally arising ones cultural viruses and the human-crafted ones designer viruses. A designer virus is carefully crafted to infect people with a set of memes…
One prominent researcher on the public understanding of science has even found that due to their failure to understand basic scientific terms or the nature of the scientific process, 80 percent of Americans can't read the New York Times science section.
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be…
I guess to me the biggest change is that nowadays you can't possibly know everything that's going on in the computer. There are things that are absolutely out of your control because it's impossible to know everything about all the software. Back in the '7Os a computer had only 4,000 words of memory. It was possible…
Seibel: You mention four disciplines: music, graphics, mathematics, and text those are about as old as humanity. Clearly there are powerful ideas there that are independent of computers—the computer just provides a way to explore them that might be hard without the computer. Is there also a set of interesting…
You know the old story about the telephone and the telephone operators? The story is. sometime fairly early in the adoption of the telephone, when it was clear that use of the telephone was just expanding at an incredible rate, more and more people were having to be hired to work as operators because we didn't have…