16 APR 2018 by ideonexus
Pianos Make Music Accessible Like Computers Make Math Acc...
Though it has become a naturalized part of music-making since the first one was built in 1710, the pianoforte (its name means "soft-loud") was a technical marvel for its time, a machine that changed music in ways that are hard to imagine. Computer pioneer Alan Kay once observed that any technological advance is "technology only for people who are born before it was invented,' and in the case of the piano, this applies to no one alive today. Seymour Papert, the MIT researcher, concluded, "That...
1 29 MAY 2015 by ideonexus
The Past is a Brutally Foreign Place
If the past is a foreign country, it is a shockingly violent one. It is easy to forget how dangerous life used to be, how deeply brutality was once woven into the fabric of daily existence. Cultural memory pacifies the past, leaving us with pale souvenirs whose bloody origins have been bleached away. A woman donning a cross seldom reflects that this instrument of torture was a common punishment in the ancient world; nor does a person who speaks of a whipping boy ponder the old practice of flo... 1 
notes
notes21 JAN 2014 by ideonexus
Understanding is Music
Sure there is music even in the beauty, and the silent note which Cupid Strikes, far sweeter than the sound of an instrument. For there is music wherever there is harmony, order and proportion; and thus far we may maintain the music of the spheres; for those well ordered motions, and regular paces, though they give no sound unto the ear, yet to the understanding they strike a note most full of harmony. 1 notes
notesKnowledge brings us harmony everywhere.
31 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Radio Telescopes as the Stethoscope Observing the Universe
When they [radio astronomers] grew weary at their electronic listening posts. When their eyes grew dim with looking at unrevealing dials and studying uneventful graphs, they could step outside their concrete cells and renew their dull spirits in communion with the giant mechanism they commanded, the silent, sensing instrument in which the smallest packets of energy, the smallest waves of matter, were detected in their headlong, eternal flight across the universe. It was the stethoscope with w...Folksonomies: astronomy
Folksonomies: astronomy
1 notes
notesTaking it's pulse.
09 MAY 2012 by ideonexus
Burning a Diamond
To day we made the grand experiment of burning the diamond and certainly the phenomena presented were extremely beautiful and interesting... The Duke's burning glass was the instrument used to apply heat to the diamond. It consists of two double convex lenses ... The instrument was placed in an upper room of the museum and having arranged it at the window the diamond was placed in the focus and anxiously watched. The heat was thus continued for 3/4 of an hour (it being necessary to cool the g...Folksonomies: chemistry
Folksonomies: chemistry
1 notes
notesFaraday describes and experiment with Davy where they set a diamond on fire.
23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
A Bird Works According to Mathematical Law
A bird is an instrument working according to mathematical law, which instrument it is within the capacity of man to reproduce with all its movements, but not with a corresponding degree of strength, though it is deficient only in the power of maintaining equilibrium. We may therefore say that such an instrument constructed by man is lacking in nothing except the life of the bird, and this life must needs be supplied from that of man. Folksonomies: engineering
Folksonomies: engineering
1 notes
notesLeonardo da Vinci equates a bird with a machine, needing an inventor to give it life.
31 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Science Takes Us Beyond Our Experience
The aim of scientific thought, then, is to apply past experience to new circumstances; the instrument is an observed uniformity in the course of events. By the use of this instrument it gives us information transcending our experience, it enables us to infer things that we have not seen from things that we have seen; and the evidence for the truth of that information depends on our supposing that the uniformity holds good beyond our experience. Folksonomies: inference experience
Folksonomies: inference experience
1 notes
notesThe act of inference is positing behaviors and laws onto things we have no experience of yet.
15 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
Heat Makes Solids Fluids and Fluids Gases
The opinion I formed from attentive observation of the facts and phenomena, is as follows. When ice, for example, or any other solid substance, is changing into a fluid by heat, I am of opinion that it receives a much greater quantity of heat than that what is perceptible in it immediately after by the thermometer. A great quantity of heat enters into it, on this occasion, without making it apparently warmer, when tried by that instrument. This heat, however, must be thrown into it, in order ... 1 notes
notesBlack believes there is more heat going into ice that turns to water than is registered on a thermometer.
31 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Music Lessons Teach Children Emotional Nuance
10 years of music lessons
There’s another powerful way to fine-tune a child’s hearing for the emotional aspects of speech: musical training. Researchers in the Chicago area showed that musically experienced kids—those who studied any instrument for at least 10 years, starting before age 7—responded with greased-lightning speed to subtle variations in emotion-laden cues, such as a baby’s cry. The scientists tracked changes in the timing, pitch, and timbre of the baby’s cry, all t... 1 notes
notesChildren who begin music lessons before the age of seven have a greater ability to detect emotional nuance than children who do not.
08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
The Use of Gold for Money Leads to Efforts to Inflate Its...
Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, and abolished from ideal society as though it were the cause instead of the instrument of human baseness; but, indeed, there is nothing bad in gold. Making gold into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the State is punishing the hatchet for the murderer's crime. Money, did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, a necessary thing in civilised human life, as complicated, indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as the bo...Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
1 notes
notesReminds me of the Mortgage crisis, when homes became a source of money and every effort was made to over-inflate their value.
