16 AUG 2014 by ideonexus
Orwell Notes Hitler's Rigidity of Mind
It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle. The obvious intention of the translator’s preface and notes is to tone down the book’s ferocity and present Hitler in as kindly a light as possible. For at that date Hitler was still respectable. He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost...
1 He notes that Hitler's ideas did not change at all over 15 years and that is a mark of madness.
21 APR 2014 by ideonexus
Evolution of Sea Turtle Migrations
Each year around Christmas time, green turtles (Chelonia mydas) leave their shallow feeding grounds along the coast of Brazil and embark upon a 2000 km journey to their nesting grounds, the beaches of Ascension Island, in the mid-Atlantic. The journey takes a little more than 2 months in both directions, and is a miracle of navigation. Biologists have long wondered how the turtles manage the feat, and also why they bother to do it at all.
Fifteen years ago two researchers, Archie Carr and Pa...Folksonomies: evolution
Folksonomies: evolution
1 
notes
notesExplained by continental drift (later discredited).
26 FEB 2014 by ideonexus
tokamak
It is called a tokamak—old Soviet shorthand for a more precise and geometrical name, toroidalnaya kamera s aksialnym magnitnym polem, or “toroidal chamber with an axial magnetic field.” Sakharov’s rough sketch depicted a doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber, or torus, ringed with electromagnets, and that is how iter’s core will look, too, once it is completed.
In myriad ways, the project is a fragment of the Cold War stranded in the present day. Sakharov had predicted that a reactor base... 1 notes
notes“toroidal chamber with an axial magnetic field.”
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
An Early Experiment Hinting at DNA
Anomaly (2) was observed by Fred Griffith, decades before DNA and the genetic code. He found that if you inject a heat-treated, dead, virulent species of bacteria (pneumococcus S) into a rat previously infected with a nonvirulent species (pneumococcus R), then species R became transformed into species S, thereby killing the rat. About fifteen years later, Oswald Avery found that you can even do this in a test tube; dead S would transform live R into live S if the two were simply incubated tog... 1 notes
notesV. S. Ramachandran on a fascinating experiment involving combining dead bacteria with live to produce new bacteria.
19 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Accelerating Knowledge
The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe
has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp upward leap with the
invention of writing, but even so it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next
great leap forward in knowledge—acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable
type in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic
estimates, Europe was producing books at a...Toffler describes and quantifies the increasing production of information in human civilization and its implications.
27 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Okinawa Culture as a Blue Zone
We found our second Blue Zone on the other side of the planet, about 800 miles south of Tokyo, on the archipelago of Okinawa. Okinawa is actually 161 small islands. And in the northern part of the main island, this is ground zero for world longevity. This is a place where the oldest living female population is found. It's a place where people have the longest disability-free life expectancy in the world. They have what we want. They live a long time, and tend to die in their sleep, very quick...Habits and culture of the people with the longest life-expectancy on the planet.
19 JAN 2013 by ideonexus
Anti-Science in Communism
Suppression of knowledge weakened Russia in the Lysenko affair. which a political ideologue and former peasant named Trofim Lysenko ingratiated himself to communist leaders and was placed in charge of national agriculture because of his ideological conformity. He denounced and suppressed scientists who questioned his odd schemes as "fly lovers and people haters"^^ (because geneticists were doing fruit fly research-h—I kid you not!) and his uneducated methods decimated Soviet agriculture. So... 1 notes
notesThe USSR and China as examples of how anti-science attitudes and political loyalty over empiricism damaged both countries.
28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
The Virtue of Openness
Openness has several facets, but all are rooted in the same two principles: embracing your own fallibility and embracing diversity.
Secularists, being human, are as prone as anyone to cling stubbornly to our opinions once they’re established. Openness includes recognizing our own fallibility: No matter how thoroughly we have examined a question, we could still be wrong. The best way to avoid being wrong is to keep our opinions and ideas open to challenge and potential disconfirmation.
The... 1 notes
notesThe best way to avoid being wrong is to be open to ideas that challenge us.
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.
01 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Emergence Through Emergencies
Very frequently I hear or read of my artifacts adjudged by critics as
being "failures," because I did not get them into mass-production and
"make money with them." Such money-making-as-criteria-of-success critics
do not realize that money-making was never my goal. I learned very early
and painfully that you have to decide at the outset whether you are
trying to make money or to make sense, as they are mutually exclusive. I
saw that nature has various categories of unique gestation lags betwee...Folksonomies: environmentalism innovation
Folksonomies: environmentalism innovation
1 notes
notesBuckminster Fuller explains that many of his ideas haven't caught on, not because they aren't profitable, but because our lack of foresight hasn't yet created a sufficient emergency situation to prompt their adoption.
