22 JUN 2016 by ideonexus
Freeman Dyson's Optimism
Brand: I was looking at your 1988 book, Infinite in All Directions, and remembering what it was that excited me about it. Ten years ago, most people I knew were in the depths of a kind of bad mood, harboring a pessimistic feeling that things were going to keep getting worse for the rest of their lives. But your book had this pragmatic and also rather cosmic optimism about it; it came as a complete counter to the cultural flow at that point. Did you perceive that at the time?
Dyson: Oh yes. I...
1 30 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
Rebuking the "Good Old Days"
When you hear someone longing for the "good old days," take it with a grain of salt. (Laughter and applause.) Take it with a grain of salt. We live in a great nation and we are rightly proud of our history. We are beneficiaries of the labor and the grit and the courage of generations who came before. But I guess it's part of human nature, especially in times of change and uncertainty, to want to look backwards and long for some imaginary past when everything worked, and the economy humme... 1 
notes
notes14 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Rosa Parks the Quiet Hero
For years before the day in December 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, she worked behind the scenes for the NAACP, even receiving training in nonviolent resistance. Many things had inspired her political commitment. The time the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of her childhood house. The time her brother, a private in the U.S. Army who’d saved the lives of white soldiers, came home from World War II only to be spat upon. The time a black eighteen-year-old del... 1 notes
notesShe was an introvert, but also one highly-trained in the art of passive resistance.
08 AUG 2013 by ideonexus
Secrecy Led to the Loss of Chinese Technological Achievem...
While these state records survive, most of the ancient Chinese literature on astronomy has disappeared. Because astronomy was so state-oriented, so security-bound, and so secret, the old astronomy books have left few traces. By contrast, the early books on mathematics, which were used by merchants, directors of public works, and military commanders, have survived in considerable numbers. Repeated imperial edicts enforced state security for calendrical science, astronomy, and astrology. In A.D... 1 notes
notesThe state guarded its understanding of Astronomy and Time-Keeping so that history has little record of the details of how advanced it was. In contrast, public science is known and revered by historians.
24 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Potentially 90 Percent of Crime Rate Changes Explained by...
IN 1994, RICK NEVIN WAS A CONSULTANT working for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development on the costs and benefits of removing lead paint from old houses. This has been a topic of intense study because of the growing body of research linking lead exposure in small children with a whole raft of complications later in life, including lower IQ, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
But as Nevin was working on that assignment, his client suggested they might b...23 years after lead was removed from gasoline, crime rates went up and down dramatically.
18 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
The Privatization of Science
At this point the Wall Street lawyers and Strauss persuaded Eisenhower that the United States Bureau of Standards' scientists were in competition with private enterprise and must be curbed. Strauss assured Eisenhower that the corporations would take on all the bureau's discarded scientists. What the Wall Street lawyers' grand strategists realized was something momentous—to wit... that in the new 99.9-percent invisible reality of alloys, chemistry, electronics, and atomics, scientific and tech... 1 notes
notesAfter WWII, private enterprise took over science from the government, taking it away from the common person as well.
16 MAR 2013 by ideonexus
The Critical Path
H UMANITY IS MOVING EVER DEEPER into crisis—a crisis without prec¬ edent.
av upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely-deployed-from-one-another, differently col¬ ored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a completely integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.
Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irr... 1 notes
notesIt's all about energy, power, and innovation. Buckminster's clever perspective on human history.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
America is Naturally Anti-Science
In the end, politics is about story. Robert McKee, Hollywood's master of storytelling, views the world from the top of America's other great cultural export—its movies.
"1 think that the American ethos is not science-friendly and never has been," he says. "The American model is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Guys who never went to college and who were geniuses and invented things, and people like them. The inventor versus the scientist. Somebody who can go west, discover gold mines, and crea...Science is hard work, America is about the dream of Hollywood. We are living on the benefits of science, but will those innovations become cultural rituals if we won't do what we need to do to promote science and education?
08 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
A Flu Pandemic Reduces Quality of Life for Babies
Initially, Almond doubted that the intrauterine conditions provided by a pregnant woman, even one sick with a virulent strain of the flu, could exert any lasting influence on her offspring. “When I started looking at the influenza pandemic, I was skeptical of the fetal origins hypothesis. I didn’t think I’d find any long-term effects,” Almond says. “But the evidence was the opposite of what I expected.” Through an analysis of census data, Almond discovered that those individuals gestated duri...Folksonomies: pregnancy fetal development
Folksonomies: pregnancy fetal development
Children born during the flu pandemic grew up to have a poorer socioeconomic status than those born at other times.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
History VS Science
History generally is written by the victors to justify their actions, to arouse patriotic fervour, and to suppress the legitimate claims of the vanquished. When no overwhelming victory takes place, each side writes self-promotional accounts of what really happened. English histories castigated the French, and vice versa; US histories until very recently ignored the de facto policies of lebensraum and genocide toward Native Americans; Japanese histories of the events leading to World War II mi... 1 notes
notesHistory is written from a perspective, science tries to reconstruct events.
