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In fact, an early clue to the potential risks posed by plastic was discovered entirely by accident. In August of 1998, Washington State University geneticist Patricia Hunt found herself baffled by an unexpected development in her lab. Hunt was using experiments on lab mice to explore why the eggs of older women are…
Only when a few curious people said "I don't know" did science begin. Recognition of our ignorance is a prerequisite of scientific discovery.
To ANYONE who has been in space and experienced its changelessness, the real excitement of space flight comes when it is time to land on a new planet. The ground speeds backward under you as you catch glimpses of land and water, of geometrical areas and lines that might represent fields and roads. You become aware of…
Mathematicians use the idea of proof to make a distinction between a 'conjecture' and a 'theorem', which bears a superficial resemblance to the OED's distinction between the two senses of 'theory'. A conjecture is a proposition that looks true but has never been proved. It will become a theorem when it has been…
Theory, Sense 1: A scheme or system of ideas or statements held as an explanation or account of a group of facts or phenomena; a hypothesis that has been confirmed or established by observation or experiment, and is propounded or accepted as accounting for the known facts; a statement of what are held to be the…
...why does it matter what biases and emotional predispositions scientists bring to their studies, so long as they are scrupulously honest and other people with different proclivities check their results? Presumably no one would argue that the conservative view on the sum of fourteen and twenty-seven differs from the…
Seibel: Do you think of yourself as a scientist, an engineer, an artist, or a draftsman? Allen: I think of myself as a computer scientist I was involved in my corner of the field in helping it develop. And those were interesting times—the emergence of computer science—because there was a Ic lot of question about, "Is…
Suppose someone describing something to me from postulates like. "Here's a computer and here are the op codes." I can visualize the structure of programs and how things are efficient or inefficient based on those op codes, by seeing the bottom and imagining the hierarchy. And i can see the same thing with programs. If…
One of the things that I've been thinking about off and on over the last five-plus years is, "Why is programming so hard?" You have the algorithmic side of programming and that's i close enough to mathematics that you can use mathematics as the basic model, if you will, for what goes on in it. You can use mathematical…
4- As an example, consider the practice of mathematics. Mathematics is in the first place a language in which we discuss those parts of the real world which can be described by numbers or by similar relations of order. But with the workaday business of translating the facts into this language there naturally goes, in…
He was 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. 'By G—,' sayd he, (He would now and then sweare, by way of emphasis) 'By G—,' sayd he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the…
The contents of a Doomsday Chest will include stainless steel or titanium sheets, laser etched with an archive of the fundamentals of human knowledge. Each sheet would be carved, front and back, in the five most widely spoken languages of the 21st Century; Mandarin, Spanish, English, Arabic and Hindi. To aid in their…
When I do long division or even multiplication I don’t try to remember the intermediate numbers. Long ago I learned to write them down. Because of paper and pencil I am “smarter” in arithmetic. In a similar manner I now no longer to try remember facts, or even where I found the facts. I have learned to summon them on…
Asymmetric attention is the key to another important concept, celebrity. Being famous means that a lot of people pay attention to you--after all, by definition it is famous people who appear on the cover of magazines, which are purchased because lots of people want to know what's happening with their favorite…
My cousin, at that time, who was three years older, was in high school and was having considerable difficulty with his algebra and had a tutor come, and I was allowed to sin in a corder while (LAUGHS) the tutor would try to teach my cousin algebra, problems liek 2x plus something. I said to my cousin then, "What're…
You see the problem fo obtaining facts from experience--it sounds very, very simple. You just try it and see. But man is a weak character and it turns out to be much more difficult than you think to just try it and see. For instance, you take education. Some guy comes along and he sees the way people teach…
NLP works well statistically; the SW, in contrast, requires logic and doesn't yet make substantial use of statistics. Natural language is democratic, as expressed in the slogan 'meaning is use' (see Section 5.1 for more discussion of this). The equivalent in the SW of the words of natural language are logical terms…
Web topology contains more complexity than simple linear chains. In this section, we will discuss attempts to measure the global structure of the Web, and how individual webpages fit into that context. Are there interesting representations that define or suggest important properties? For example, might it be possible…
There are many different types of reasoning, but not too many have been successfully automated beyond deductive linear reasoning and various statistical methods. What alternative methods has the Web facilitated? One obvious candidate is associative reasoning, where reasoning on the basis of associations - which can be…
Corollary 1: The smaller the studies conducted in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Corollary 2: The smaller the effect sizes in a scientific field, the less likely the research findings are to be true. Corollary 3: The greater the number and the lesser the selection of tested…