27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus
Tadpole and Fish Fable of Comprehension
Michael Dickmann: Here's what the story is. There was this little tadpole and a fish that grew up in a pond, and they were always intensely curious about life outside the pond. And then, eventually, the tadpole grows into a frog and discovers that, because he's an amphibian, he can go out and see what life is like. So he comes back and tells the fish what he's seen.
He says, "Well, look, one of the things is that there's neat creatures called birds that can actually fly in the air, and they ... 1 
notes
notes31 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Aristotle Was About Quantity, Not Quality, of Thought
I don't doubt that Aristotle thought more in actual footage during his life than any other person ever thought in the same elapsed time of sixty-two years. I do say, however, that any prize he deserves for so doing should be for quantity, not quality, as a great deal of it was spinach. He would sit around and think like one possessed, or he would walk around and think, since he was a Peripatetic, as they called it in those days. And then he would announce that Swallows spend the winter under ... 1 notes
notes03 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
Humanity has Reached the Hatching Point
To begin our position-fixing
aboard our Spaceship Earth we must first acknowledge that the
abundance of immediately consumable, obviously desirable or
utterly essential resources have been sufficient until now to allow us
to carry on despite our ignorance. Being eventually exhaustible and
spoilable, they have been adequate only up to this critical moment.
This cushion-for-error of humanity's survival and growth up to now
was apparently provided just as a bird inside of the egg is provided
wi... 1 notes
notesThinking of our Earth as an egg, we have been living on the yolk so far. We are reaching the point, by burning our fossile fuels off and exceeding the production capacity of our agriculture, where our intellect must launch us into the stars.
11 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Language is Alive
Language is simply alive, like an organism. We all tell each other this, in fact, when we speak of living languages, and I think we mean something more than an abstract metaphor. We mean alive. Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals. Mutations occur. Words fuse, and then mate. Hybrid words and wild varieties or compound words are the progeny. Some mixed word... 1 notes
notesIt evolves, leaves fossils, speciates, etc.
21 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Australopithecus afarensis' Hip Bone Indicates She Could ...
When Lucy’s hundreds of fragments were assembled, she turned out
to be a female of a new species, Australopithecus afarensis, dating back
3.2 million years. She was between 20 and 30 years old, 3.5feet tall,
weighing a scant 60 pounds, and possibly afflicted with arthritis. But
most important, she walked on two legs.
How can we tell? From the way that the femur (thighbone) connects to
the pelvis at one end and to the knee at its other. In a bipedally
walking primate like ourselves, the fem... 1 notes
notesThe bone tilts to bring the knees inward, like it does in humans, but not in chimps, who waddle because they are bow-legged.
16 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Evolution Remodels the Old into New
...evolutionary change, even of a major sort, nearly always
involves remodeling the old into the new. The legs of land animals are
variations on the stout limbs of ancestral fish. The tiny middle ear bones
of mammals are remodeled jawbones of their reptilian ancestors. The
wings of birds were fashioned from the legs of dinosaurs. And whales are
stretched-out land animals whose forelimbs have become paddles and
whose nostrils have moved atop their head.
1 Evolution modifies existing structures rather than creating new ones from scratch.
05 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
Humans Don't Have Roots
In the very largest way of looking at planet Earth's socioeconomic-evolution events, we must observe
that humans are designed with legs and not roots. Yesterday, humanity developed temporary roots as it
cultivated its life-support food root-grown on the land. The metals made possible metal canning of food
and mobilization of machinery. Today, all of human existence depends on the swift, world-around
intercommunication system operating at 186,000 miles per second. We have transformed reality f... 1 notes
notesThrough science, we are evolving to become more free, free from biological roots and free from Capitalistic chains, where ownership of real estate holds us down.
28 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Ichabod Crane, America's First Fictional Nerd
[Ichabod Crane] was a native of Connecticut; a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head wa...Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism
Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow's main character's biggest flaw is that he is a nerd, and after her vanishes, the people move the school and burn some of his books.
