21 APR 2017 by ideonexus
Law, Education, Religion are Names We Give to Adaptation
The changes in the conditions of human life during the last twenty or thirty thousand years have been mainly brought about by the acceleration of invention through increasing co-operation and the release of material and social power. There have been no doubt climatic and geographical changes, but their share has been relatively less important. The essential story of history and pre-history is the story of the adaptation of the social- educated superstructure of the animal man to the novel pro... 1 
notes
notes02 SEP 2016 by ideonexus
Abuse of Science in Politics
North Carolina provides a recent example of science-based policy. The science itself was a study of voting habits among the population of the state. In 2013, North Carolina passed new voting restrictions. To inform those restrictions, the legislature commissioned a study on voting habits by race, and then wrote into law a series of restrictions that specifically targeted African Americans. (Last month, a Federal Court struck down these restrictions, claiming that “the new provisions target ...
1 10 MAY 2016 by ideonexus
You Need More than Passion to Change the World
You have to go through life with more than just passion for change; you need a strategy. I'll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.
[...]
But to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom. If you care about mass incarceration, let me ask you: How are you pressuring members of Congress to pass the criminal justice ... 1 notes
notes27 APR 2015 by ideonexus
Math Problem: How Long Until the Earth Falls Into the Sun?
Our earth has orbital motion, revolving once around the sun in about 365 days. Suppose that this orbital motion suddenly stopped completely, but everything else remained the same. How long would it take for the earth to plunge along a straight line into the sun?
[...]
Kepler's law applies to planetary orbits, whether they be of circular, or elliptical shape. It says that T22/T12 = R23/R13, where T is the period of an orbit and R is its semi-major axis. The semi-major axis is the average... 1 notes
notes19 MAR 2015 by ideonexus
Hyperlinks as Conversation
Hyperlinks are fine-grained, bidirectional, and extrinsic. Frequently, an argument is not with a document or chapter as a whole. It is with a particular point that someone made at a particular place in the text. For example, someone refers to the fourth law of thermodynamics, and someone else writes a criticism saying there is no fourth law of thermodynamics, linking it to the original. The fine-grained property allows the link to designate the particular piece of text with which one is takin... 1 notes
notesFrom Mark S. Miller's "The Open Society and Its Media"
16 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Death is Not a Law of Nature
Nature is regarded as a death-bearing, self-destructive force, but not because of its blindness. Yet where can a blind force lead except to death ? Humans admit nature to be a blind force even when they regard themselves as part of it and accept death as a kind of law and not as a mere accident which has permeated nature and become its organic vice. Yet death is merely the result or manifestation of our infantilism, lack of independence and self-reliance, and of our incapacity for mutual supp...Folksonomies: transhumanism
Folksonomies: transhumanism
27 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Why Economists Will Continue to be Wrong
Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed, reasonably, that the process would simply produce the same parameters that had been used to produce the data in the first place. But it didn't. It turned out that there were many ...
1 They make models based on past data, and when they fail to predict the future, they adjust them to match the new past data. The problem is that so many models will match the past data, there could be no end to the number of models they throw out.
15 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Parkinson's law of triviality
In the third chapter, "High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest", Parkinson writes about a finance committee meeting with a three-item agenda.
The first is the signing of a £10 [4] million contract to build a reactor, the second a proposal to build a £350 bicycle shed for the clerical staff, and the third proposes £21 a year to supply refreshments for the Joint Welfare Committee.
The £10 million number is too big and too technical, and it passes in two minutes and a half.
The bi...Summary provided from Wikipedia until a direct quote can be found. Concept is that the more trivial an issue, the more debate weighed on it because everyone understands the issue enough to have an opinion.
15 JUL 2013 by ideonexus
Kissenger Describes Sayre's law
I've been an academic and I've been a policy maker. And as a policy maker, I've had a lot of trouble from academics. Especially from the Ivy League, and I'm going to say one thing about academic politics to which Mr. Schramm referred. I formulated the rule that the intensity of academic politics and the bitterness of it is in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject their discussing. And I promise you at Harvard, they are passionately intense and the subjects are extremely unimport...Expressed by Sayre as "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
27 APR 2013 by ideonexus
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral
You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child rem...Folksonomies: science spirituality
Folksonomies: science spirituality
Examples of how such a person can provide comfort and consolation.
