09 JAN 2017 by ideonexus
Distopian View Praising Second-Hand Knowledge
The first of these was the abolition of respirator.
Advanced thinkers, like Vashti, had always held it foolish to visit the surface of the earth. Air-ships might be necessary, but what was the good of going out for mere curiosity and crawling along for a mile or two in a terrestrial motor? The habit was vulgar and perhaps faintly improper: it was unproductive of ideas, and had no connection with the habits that really mattered. So respirators were abolished, and with them, of course, the ter... 1 
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notes25 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
Laura Betzig: Culture
What if the 100,000-odd year-old evidence of human social life—from the arrowheads in South Africa, to the Venus figurines at Dordogne—is the effect of nothing, more or less, but our efforts to become parents? What if the 10,000-odd year-old record of civilization—from the tax accounts at temples in the Near East, to the inscription on a bronze statue in New York Harbor—is the product of nothing, more or less, but our struggle for genetic representation in future generations?
[...]
... 1 notes
notes22 JUN 2013 by ideonexus
A Brief History of Signals
Prior to the advent of practical electrical communication, human beings had been signaling over a distance in all kinds of ways. The bell in the church tower called people to religious services or “for whom the bell tolls”—the announcement of a death. We knew a priori several things about church bells. We knew approximately when services were to begin, and we knew that a long, slow tolling of the bells announced death. Thus we could distinguish one from the other, namely a call to relig...Folksonomies: communications signals
Folksonomies: communications signals
1 notes
notesFrom church bells, speech, body language, semaphores, fires, and smoke signals.
17 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Benjamin Franklin on Daylight Savings Time
I say it is impossible that so sensible a people [citizens of Paris], under such circumstances, should have lived so long by the smoky, unwholesome, and enormously expensive light of candles, if they had really known that they might have had as much pure light of the sun for nothing. 1 notes
notesNoting that the people of Paris spend much money on candles when they could simply adjust their clocks to rise with the sun.
16 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Pendulum Moves East to West
The observations, so numerous and so important, of the pendulum as object are especially relevant to the length of its oscillations. Those that I propose to make known to the [Paris] Academy [of Sciences] are principally addressed to the direction of the plane of its oscillation, which, moving gradually from east to west, provides evidence to the senses of the diurnal movement of the terrestrial globe. 1 notes
notesDemonstrating the rotation of the Earth.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Humphery Davy: Poem About a Weeping Monument
My eye is wet with tears
For I see the white stones
That are covered with names
The stones of my forefathers’ graves.
No grass grows upon them
For deep in the earth
In darkness and silence the organs of life
To their primitive atoms return.
Through ages the air
Has been moist with their blood
The ages the seeds of the thistle has fed
On what was once motion and form...
Thoughts roll not beneath the dust
No feeling is in the cold grave
They have leaped to other worlds
They are far above t...
1 There are various versions of this early poem in the HD Archive: see Paris, vol 1, p29; Treneer, pp4-5; or Fullmer, p13
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science is a Relay Race
Indeed, there is a particular problem with finding endings in science. Where do these science stories really finish? Science is truly a relay race, with each discovery handed on to the next generation. Even as one door is closing, another door is already being thrown open. So it is with this book. The great period of Victorian science is about to begin. The new stories are passed into the hands of Michael Faraday, John Herschel, Charles Darwin …and the world of modern science begins to rush...It is difficult to know where to end a story about science, because the discoveries never cease and will continue into the future.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Davy VS Gay-Lussac in the Race to Discover Iodine
He was warmly received by Cuvier, Ampère and Berthollet, but got into an awkward priority dispute with the gifted young chemist Joseph Gay-Lussac. Gay-Lussac, Davy’s exact contemporary, had made a popular name in France with his intrepid ballooning exploits, and had been hard on Davy’s heels with potassium and sodium experiments. Both were now given by the Académie des Sciences a newly isolated substance to analyse: a strange violet crystal recently found as a byproduct of gunpowder man... 1 notes
notesStill disputed as to who won the race.
02 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
A Mastectomy Without Anesthesia
In September 1811 the Herschels’ old friend Fanny Burney, by then the married Madame d’Arblay, underwent an agonising operation for breast cancer without anaesthetic. It was carried out by an outstanding French military surgeon, Dominique Larrey, in Paris, and so successfully concluded that she lived for another twenty years. What is even more remarkable, Fanny Burney remained conscious throughout the entire operation, and subsequently wrote a detailed account of this experience, watching... 1 notes
notesFanny Burney's horrific account of undergoing surgery to have a breast removed.
17 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Attempts to Discern the Authorship of the Treatise of the...
here have been but few scholars whose religious beliefs were dubious, who have not been credited with the authorship of this treatise.
Avervoes, a famous Arabian commentator on Aristotle's works, and celebrated for his learning, was the first to whom this production was attributed. He lived about the middle of the twelfth century when the three impostors "were first spoken of. He was not a Christian, as he treated their religion as "the Impossible," nor a Jew, whose law he called "a Religion... 1 notes
notesA list of suspects, none of whom were probably involved with its authorship, that reads like a list of heretics.
