Science Can Never Weary the Mind

Unlike religion, Science can never weary the mind: the dreary monotony of the former is a perfect contrast to the life-inspiring power of the latter. Every step you take in Science, stimulates you to further pursuit. The vast volume of nature, that book of books, that only revelation worthy the attention of man, is always open to the Man of Science; and in this book the child can find a language that shall be intelligible, and adapted to his youthful capacity. He can read here without stupify...

 The Early Days of the Printing Press was Like the Early WWW

As was the case during the early days of the World Wide Web, however, the quality of the information was highly varied. While the printing press paid almost immediate dividends in the production of higher quality maps,10 the bestseller list soon came to be dominated by heretical religious texts and pseudoscientific ones.11 Errors could now be mass-produced, like in the so-called Wicked Bible, which committed the most unfortunate typo in history to the page: thou shalt commit adultery.12 Meanw...

 A Poem to Teach a Child

We live in an age of information. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child. From a science book we might learn that a flying bat might snap up 15 insects per minute, or that the frequency of its squeal can range as high as 50,000 cycles per second. Useful information, yes. But consider the information in this poem from Randall Jarrell's "The Bat Poet": A bat is born Naked and blind and pale. His mother makes a pocket of her tail And catches him. He cling...