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Emilie sits on her father's lap and excitedly stares at the shiny brass bell that the research assistant across the table is holding. Making sure Emilie is watching, the assistant places the bell into one of two matching wells in the table and then quickly covers both wells with identical cloths. Emilie is eager to…
Obtaining a more broadly informed view of parenting means examining parenting styles not just cross-culturally but through evolutionary history as well. Underneath the cultural twists that skew our behavior lies a natural biology, a human nature, that evolved a certain way for good biological reasons. Organic beings…
Study nature to find your voice. One reason the natural history genre thrives today is the tremendous variety of voices it makes possible: the wild exactness of Annie Dillard, the calm thankfulness of Terry Tempest Williams, the scientific precision of Bernd Heinrich. But again, this is not just the province of…
Some images of the molecules of life, as they are displayed on the color computer screen, resemble the gorgeous stained-glass windows and soaring architectural members of the Gothic cathedrals. A cross-section of the B DNA double helix, for example, bears a likeness to the magnificent rose window at Chartres. The…
When I undertook to answer My own 1927 self-questioning: "Why have humans been included In the design of Universe?" My hypothetical answer of 1927 Was, and as yet is: What impresses me most Is the experientially demonstrable fact That all living organisms Other than humans Have some organically integral equipment That…
Overcoming fear requires you to train yourself to think every time you feel fear, rather than just reacting instinctively. The thought process I go through goes like this: I'm scared. Is it physical danger? No. Well, when I make a decision based on fear, it's often a bad one, so I'm going to put the fear aside and ask…
We now find that a great many things we thought were natural laws are really human conventions. You know that even in the remotest depths of stellar space there are still three feet to a yard. That is, no doubt, a very remarkable fact, but you would hardly call it a law of nature. And a great many things that have…
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…
[Cloak] defined the i-culture as the instructions in people's heads, and the m-culture as the features of people's behaviour, their technology and social organization. he explicitly likened his i-culture to the genotype and m-culture to the phenotype... in The Extended Phenotype [Dawkins] says 'Unfortunately, unlike…
We should think of it like this - evolutionary theory describes how design is created by the competition between replicators. Genes are one example of a replicator and memes another. The general theory of evolution must apply to both of them, but the specific details of how each replicator works may be quite…
Gentlemen of honour, according to the old standards, rode horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentlemen of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort of athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all…
To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you're putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it's very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don't know…
A final point briefly worth making is that the Web is a space designed to let information flow, and to create opportunities for cooperation and collaboration. It is worth asking why freer information flow is a good thing, and the answers are pretty straightforward. It is good to have the freedom to express oneself in…
Global metrics look at extracting information about the graph as a whole. Compactness is a measure of how connected the graph is; a compact graph means that, in general, it is easy to reach a randomlychosen node from another. The usual measure has a range between 0 (totally disconnected nodes) and 1 (universal…
When people first sit down to design and architecture or write a program, things tend to be linear. That's the way most people think--do this and then always do that. But thinking this way leads to temporal coupling: coupling in time. Method A must always be called before method B; only one report can be run at a…
This essay, while dealing with computational theory, provides a model for how the brain functions. The Pandemonium Model, where multiple processes try to answer a patter, with a administrative function picking the best answer, provides an excellent model for the environment in which the brain evolved, with useful…
In computer programming our basic building block has an associated time grain of less than a microsecond, but our program may take hours of computation time. I do not know of any other technology covering a ratio of 10^10 or more: the computer, by virtue of its fantastic speed, seems to be the first to provide us with…
Every transistor radio is, by the nature of its construction, at the same time a potential transmitter; it can interact with other receivers by circuit reversal. The development from a mere distribution medium to a communications medium is technically not a problem. It is consciously prevented fro understandable…
Construction of a drawing with Sketchpad is itself a model of the design process. The locations of the points and lines of the drawing model the variables of a design, and the geometric constraints applied to the points and lines of the drawing model the design constraints which limit the values of design variables…