Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasp...
notes "Colic" Means "I don't know why your baby is crying"
The strict medical definition of colic is a condition of a healthy baby in which it shows periods of intense, unexplained fussing/crying lasting more than 3 hours a day, more than 3 days a week for more than 3 weeks.
There’s that word there, unexplained. For years I thought this word “colic” described a phenomenon that was understood and therefore natural. The etymology of the word, pertaining to “disease characterized by severe abdominal pain” in the early 15th century suggests ...
1 Habitable Worlds as a Cause for Moral Reflection
In this great celestial creation, the catastrophy of a world, such as ours, or even the total dissolution of a system of worlds, may possibly be no more to the great Author of Nature, than the most common accident in life with us, and in all probability such final and general Doomsdays may be as frequent there, as even Birthdays or mortality with us upon the earth. This idea has something so chearful in it, that I own I can never look upon the stars without wondering why the whole world does ... notes Giordano Bruno Observations of the Sun
The meaning is the more excellence, as it is the less vulgar, and you will see that it is single, unified, and not strained. You must consider that although the sun appears different with respect to different regions of the earth according to time and place, nevertheless with respect to the entire globe it acts always and everywhere in the same way, for in whatever point of the ecliptic it may find itself, it causes winter, summer, autumn, and spring, and the entire earthly globe receives the... notes...and it's effects on the Earth.
The Primitive Scientific Mind
There is no sort of savage so low as not to have a kind of science of cause and effect. But primitive man was not very critical in his associations of cause with effect; he very easily connected an effect with something quite wrong as its cause. “You do so and so,” he said, “and so and so happens.” You give a child a poisonous berry and it dies. You eat the heart of a valiant enemy and you become strong. There we have two bits of cause and effect association, one true one false. We ca... notesIt was concerned with cause and effect, but established many wrong connections.
A Zen monk in a Japanese temple draws beautiful lines in the sand and makes a wonderful pattern. He then draws a line in the pattern, in his mind disfiguring the pattern, the reasoning behind this is his view is that nothing is perfect in this world.
What is perfect? That is a misconstrued concept, the world is as it should be, otherwise it would not be so. Everything around us follows the basic laws of the universe, cause and effect. Things are as they should be. That there are brutal dictatorships around the world is a result of cause and effect, it is how things should be, or they would not be like that, is that not perfect? Sure we can try and change the world and make it more just and fair, if we succeed, that is how things should be, if we fail that is how things should be, but as a human one must try ,a human being is born with the ability to act, take action and change it, if you succeed, then you have taken the action that leads to change, that is as how the world should be, is that not a perfect world?, following the laws of the universe of cause and effect. As a human take action to destroy what you do not like, but do not say it is not perfect. The world follows the laws of cause and effect perfectly, it is a perfect world.
That blacks are downtrodden does not make the world imperfect, it is a result of cause and effect, and as humans they must take action and cause things to change for the better. Without action things will remain perfectly bad for black people. Perfectly bad is still perfect.
Science and Poetry are Like Binary Stars
I would liken science and poetry in their natural independence to those binary stars, often different in colour, which Herschel's telescope discovered to revolve round each other. 'There is one light of the sun,' says St. Paul, 'and another of the moon, and another of the stars: star differeth from star in glory.' It is so here. That star or sun, for it is both, with its cold, clear, white light, is SCIENCE: that other, with its gorgeous and ever-shifting hues and magnificent blaze, is POETRY... notesThey exchange ideas and inspire one another.
The Brain's the Thing
I consider the differences between man and animals in propensities, feelings, and intellectual faculties, to be the result of the same cause as that which we assign for the variations in other functions, viz. difference of organization; and that the superiority of man in rational endowments is not greater than the more exquisite, complicated, and perfectly developed structure of his brain, and particularly of his ample cerebral hemispheres, to which the rest of the animal kingdom offers no pa... notesThat contains all our operations and distinguishes us from the other animals.
Sulfur Gains Weight When Burned
About eight days ago I discovered that sulfur in burning, far from losing weight, on the contrary, gains it; it is the same with phosphorus; this increase of weight arises from a prodigious quantity of air that is fixed during combustion and combines with the vapors. This discovery, which I have established by experiments, that I regard as decisive, has led me to think that what is observed in the combustion of sulfur and phosphorus may well take place in the case of all substances that gain ... notesQuoting Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier.
Huxley on a Bit of Scripture
As I stood behind the coffin of my little son the other day, with my mind bent on anything but disputation, the officiating minister read, as part of his duty, the words, 'If the dead rise not again, let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.' I cannot tell you how inexpressibly they shocked me. Paul had neither wife nor child, or he must have known that his alternative involved a blasphemy against all that well best and noblest in human nature. I could have laughed with scorn. What! Because... notesWhile standing at his son's coffin, he finds a passage read offensive for its implication that we devolve.
