21 APR 2017 by ideonexus
How Our Grandparents Perceive the World as Unchanging
Men can know a thing and yet know it quite ineffectively if it contradicts the general traditions and habits in which they live.
[...]
ONE of the most striking differences between the outlook of our grandparents and that of a modern intelligence today is the modification of time values that has occurred.
By the measure of our knowledge their time-scale was extremely shallow. They had scarcely any historical perspective at all. They looked back to a past of a few thousand years and at the v... 1 
notes
notes24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Technology is Preserving Our Ghosts
Our technology is giving us progressively greater power to keep alive our ancestors' ghosts. First the invention of writing allowed us to preserve their words. Painting and photography allowed us to preserve their faces. The phonograph preserves their voices and the videotape recorder preserves their movement and gestures. But this is only the beginning. Soon we shall acquire the technology to preserve a permanent record of the sequence of bases in the DNA of their cells. This means that we s...
1 24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Humanity is Not the Purpose of the Universe, It is Humani...
Another phrase which occurs frequently in the propaganda of Christian fundamentalists is "scientific humanism." Scientific humanism is supposed to be a philosophy standing in opposition to Christian faith. Fundamentalists like to pretend that we have only two alternatives, either scientific humanism or their version of Christianity. But scientific humanism has as many different meanings as scientific materialism. Roughly speaking, a scientific humanist is somebody who believes in science and ...Folksonomies: humanism
Folksonomies: humanism
1 notes
notes13 MAR 2014 by ideonexus
Donald Knuth Doesn't Use Email
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest th...Folksonomies: productivity email
Folksonomies: productivity email
1 notes
notesIt's for people who need to keep on top of things. He needs deep-immersion.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
A Second is Subjective
How many seconds are there in a lifetime? 10^9 sec
A second is an arbitrary time unit, but one that is based on our experience. Our visual system is bombarded by snapshots at a rate of around three per second, caused by rapid eye movements called saccades. Athletes often win or lose a race by a fraction of a second. If you earned a dollar for every second in your life, you would be a billionaire. However, a second can feel like a minute in front of an audience, and a quiet weekend can disap...Terrence Sejnowski on how a moment of time is a subjective experience that grows longer the more novelty is packed into it.
24 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
The Connections in the Brain
Two neurons can communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the computational unit in the brain. The typical cortical synapse is less than a micron in diameter (10-6 meter), near the resolution limit of the light microscope. If the economy of the world is a stretch for us to contemplate, thinking about all the synapses in your head is mind-boggling. If I had a dollar for every synapse in your brain, I could support the current economy of the world for ten years. Cortical neurons on ave...Folksonomies: neurology
Folksonomies: neurology
1 notes
notesTerrence Sejnowski on the incredible three-pound universe.
27 NOV 2013 by ideonexus
Adventists Live Longer
In America here, life expectancy for the average woman is 80. But for an Adventist woman, their life expectancy is 89. And the difference is even more pronounced among men, who are expected to live about 11 years longer than their American counterparts. Now, this is a study that followed about 70,000 people for 30 years. Sterling study. And I think it supremely illustrates the premise of this Blue Zone project.
This is a heterogeneous community. It's white, black, Hispanic, Asian. The only t...Habits and characteristics of Adventists that may lend to their longer lifespans.
08 OCT 2013 by ideonexus
The Individual Cannot Escape Reliance on Society
The individual cannot escape his dependence on society even when he acts on his own. A scientist who spends his lifetime in a laboratory may delude himself that he is a modern version of Robinson Crusoe, but the material of his activity and the apparatus and skills with which he operates are social products. They are inerasable signs of the cooperation which binds men together. The very language in which a scientist thinks has been learned in a particular society. Social context also determin... 1 notes
notesEveryone is connected to everyone else, no matter how secluded. Even our motivations, to become a CEO or a Scientist, stem from the society in which we are born.
08 APR 2013 by ideonexus
Roger Ebert on What to Make of Life
What I expect to happen is that my body will fail, my mind will cease to function and that will be that. My genes will not live on, because I have had no children. I am comforted by Richard Dawkins’ theory of memes. Those are mental units: thoughts, ideas, gestures, notions, songs, beliefs, rhymes, ideals, teachings, sayings, phrases, clichés that move from mind to mind as genes move from body to body. After a lifetime of writing, teaching, broadcasting and telling too many jokes, I will l...
1 He knows that his ideas will live on, if not forever, and that the most important thing to contribute to the world in life is to make others a little happier.
06 AUG 2012 by ideonexus
Knowledge Increases
The progress of the sciences secures the progress of the art of instruction, which again accelerates in its turn that of the sciences; and this reciprocal influence, the action of which is incessantly increased, must be ranked in the number of the most prolific and powerful causes of the improvement of the human race. At present, a young man, upon finishing his studies and quitting our schools, may know more of the principles of mathematics than Newton acquired by profound study, or discovere...By standing on the shoulders of giants, the college-graduate can know more than Newton learned in a lifetime through all his hard work and discovery.
