21 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
Essays Should Not Need to Argue a Point
The Age of the Essay September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school? Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Or at least, how I write one. Mods The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real ess...24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Manchester and the Birth of the Industrial Revolution
What was so exciting about Manchester? Disraeli with his acute political and historical instinct understood that Manchester had done something unique and revolutionary. Only he was wrong to call it science. What Manchester had done was to invent the Industrial Revolution, a new style of life and work which began in that little country town about two hundred years ago and inexorably grew and spread out from there until it had turned the whole world upside down. Disraeli was the first politicia...Folksonomies: academia revolution
Folksonomies: academia revolution
20 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
It is Impossible to Keep Up with New Knowledge
No man's model of reality is a purely personal product. While some of his images are based on firsthand observation, an increasing proportion of them today are based on messages beamed to us by the mass media and the people around us. Thus the degree of accuracy in his model to some extent reflects the general level of knowledge in society. And as experience and scientific research pump more refined and accurate knowledge into society, new concepts, new ways of thinking, supersede, contradict...The growth of knowledge is too fast for anyone to keep on top of it, even in specialized fields. Is the solution for everyone to become generalists?
18 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
The Story of How the Universe's Size was Determined
It was into this fiery climate of the 1920s that the Protestant-raised Hubble, adorned with the cape, cane, and British accent he had adopted while at Oxford, returned after the war. He arrived at the Carnegie Institution of Washington-funded Mount Wilson Observatory outside Pasadena, California, insisting on being called "Major Hubble."^'' Looking through the great Hooker telescope—at one hundred and one inches in diameter and weighing more than one hundred tons it was by far the largest a...Includes a cautionary tale of Shapely, who helped prove the Sun was not the center of the Universe, but who thought the Milky Way was all the Universe there was without empirical data.
16 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
The Joy of Being Wrong
It does happen. I have previously told the story of a respected elder statesman of the Zoology Department at Oxford when I was an undergraduate. For years he had passionately believed, and taught, that the Golgi Apparatus (a microscopic feature of the interior of cells) was not real: an artefact, an illusion. Every Monday afternoon it was the custom for the whole department to listen to a research talk by a visiting lecturer. One Monday, the visitor was an American cell biologist who presente...Dawkins describes a professor being convinced that he was wrong about something for many years and being thankful for convincing to the truth.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Herschel's Sister was Cheaper than a Male Assistant
Herschel made no bones about the fact that a female assistant, even his sister, would cost half as much as a male. It is possible to be indignant about this, but contemporary standards must be taken into account. Female domestic servants were paid £10 per annum, while a highly trained governess like Mary Wollstonecraft was paid £40 per annum by Lord Kingsborough in 1787. In fact a £60 stipend would have been handsome, exactly one-fifth of that paid to the Astronomer Royal. In Europe women ...A short survey of other female scientists working at the time.
10 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
The General Oblation Board
“Oh, yes,” said Lyra. “I’m safe from everyone here. Where I used to live, in Oxford, there was all kinds of dangerous things. There was gyptiansthey take kids and sell ‘em to the Turks for slaves. And on Port Meadow at the full moon there’s a werewolf that comes out from the old nunnery at Godstow. I heard him howling once. And there’s the Gobblers….” “That’s what I mean,” the man said. “That’s what they call the Oblation Board, don’t they?” Lyra felt Pantala...And how it relates to the people giving their children to the church to become "oblates."