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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…
Arcade games such as Pac-Man, Asteroids, Tempest, Gauntlet, and the like are not useless to the gamifying teacher. Rather, their use is limited . . . and their usefulness makes them more akin to board games than contemporary video games. What is Pac-Man but a game of pattern management? Gauntlet is as much about…
If a problem seems familiar, try reasoning by Analogy. If you solved a similar one in the past, and can adapt to thedifferences, you may be able to re-use that solution. If the problem still seems too hard, divide it into several parts. Every difference you recognize may suggest a separate subproblem to solve. If it…
Christopher Dewdney: Most people's “ideals” would turn them into underachieving Nicole Kidmans and eight-foot Brad Pitts, identical cutouts. My previous, rather naïve, notion was that biotechnology would free us from the tyranny of “normalcy”—that we could become anything we wanted, morph ourselves into elongated…
"In your language you have a form of poetry called the sonnet…It is a very strict form of poetry, is it not? …There are fourteen lines, I believe, all in iambic pentameter. That’s a very strict rhythm, or meter…And each line has to end with a rigid rhyme pattern. And if the poet does not do it exactly this way, it is…
[To] mechanical progress there is apparently no end: for as in the past so in the future, each step in any direction will remove limits and bring in past barriers which have till then blocked the way in other directions; and so what for the time may appear to be a visible or practical limit will turn out to be but a…
We know that nature invariably uses the same materials in its operations. Its ingeniousness is displayed only in the variation of form. Indeed, as if nature had voluntarily confined itself to using only a few basic units, we observe that it generally causes the same elements to reappear, in the same number, in the…
Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but…
I myself consider that gravity is merely a certain natural inclination with which parts are imbued by the architect of all things for gathering themselves together into a unity and completeness by assembling into the form of a globe. It is easy to believe that the Sun, Moon and other luminaries among the wandering…
What has been done is little—scarcely a beginning; yet it is much in comparison with the total blank of a century past. And our knowledge will, we are easily persuaded, appear in turn the merest ignorance to those who come after us. Yet it is not to be despised, since by it we reach up groping to touch the hem of the…
It must be understood that prime matter, and form as well, is neither generated nor corrupted, because every generation is from something to something. Now that from which generation proceeds is matter, and that to which it proceeds is form. So that, if matter or form were generated, there would be a matter for matter…
Remarkably enough, the most obvious influence over children's language development turned out to be the mere amount of parents' talking; children whose parents addressed or responded to them more in early life had larger, faster-growing vocabularies and scored higher on IQ tests than children whose parents spoke fewer…