15 MAR 2017 by ideonexus
Emulate Water
虛實: 夫兵形象水，水之形，避高而趨下：兵之形，避實而擊虛；水因地而制流，兵因敵而制勝。故兵無常勢，水無常形；能因敵變化而取勝，謂之神。故五行無常勝，四時無常位，日有短長，月有死生。
Weak Points and Strong:...: Military tactics are like unto water; for water in its natural course runs away from high places and hastens downwards. So in war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak. W... 1 
notes
notes14 MAR 2016 by ideonexus
"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 ...Folksonomies: nominal fallacy
Folksonomies: nominal fallacy
1 24 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Utopia
One may picture, then, these beings, nuclearly resident, so to speak, in a relatively small set of mental units, each utilizing the bare minimum of energy, connected together by a complex of etherial intercommunication, and spreading themselves over immense areas and periods of time by means of inert sense organs which, like the field of their active operations, would be, in general, at a great distance from themselves. As the scene of life would be more the cold emptiness of space than the w...Folksonomies: todo
Folksonomies: todo
1 notes
notes29 OCT 2014 by ideonexus
Astronomy affords the most extensive example of the conne...
Astronomy affords the most extensive example of the connection of physical sciences. In it are combined the sciences of number and quantity, or rest and motion. In it we perceive the operation of a force which is mixed up with everything that exists in the heavens or on earth; which pervades every atom, rules the motion of animate and inanimate beings, and is a sensible in the descent of the rain-drop as in the falls of Niagara; in the weight of the air, as in the periods of the moon. 1 notes
notes28 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
Beginnings of Speciation in Romantic Paintings
She wandered on her own, looking at the portraits. The big crowd scenes were too much for her, like epic movies all jammed into a single frame. The subjects of the portraits, on the other hand, looked at her with expressions she recognized immediately. “I am always me, I am always new, I am always me”—for eight centuries they had been saying it. Nothing but women and men. One woman had her left nipple exposed, just under the curve of a necklace; in most periods that would have been tran... 1 notes
notesCharacter walking around an art museum.
23 APR 2012 by ideonexus
Statistics of a Country
Statistics are far from being the barren array of figures ingeniously and laboriously combined into columns and tables, which many persons are apt to suppose them. They constitute rather the ledger of a nation, in which, like the merchant in his books, the citizen can read, at one view, all of the results of a year or of a period of years, as compared with other periods, and deduce the profit or the loss which has been made, in morals, education, wealth or power. Folksonomies: statistics
Folksonomies: statistics
1 notes
notesAre a means to see its progress "in morals, education, wealth or power."
28 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
The Birth of the Modern
The so-called 'scientific revolution', popularly associated with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but reaching back in an unmistakably continuous line to a period much earlier still. Since that revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the middle ages but of the ancient world—since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics—it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissan...Folksonomies: enlightenment modernism
Folksonomies: enlightenment modernism
1 notes
notesAside from the Enlightenment, all other periods of European history are worthless in understanding how we got to the modern era.
16 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
The Rhythms of Nature
Nature vibrates with rhythms, climatic and diastrophic, those finding stratigraphic expression ranging in period from the rapid oscillation of surface waters, recorded in ripple-mark, to those long-deferred stirrings of the deep imprisoned titans which have divided earth history into periods and eras. The flight of time is measured by the weaving of composite rhythms- day and night, calm and storm, summer and winter, birth and death such as these are sensed in the brief life of man. But the c...
3 We experience oscillations of all sorts in our lifetime, but the Universe has much larger waves hidden in geologic time.
20 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Evolution Takes Time
True, breeders haven’t turned a cat into a dog, and laboratory studies
haven’t turned a bacterium into an amoeba (although, as we’ve seen, new
bacterial species have arisen in the lab). But it is foolish to think that
these are serious objections to natural selection. Big transformations take
time—huge spans of it. To really see the power of selection, we must
extrapolate the small changes that selection creates in our lifetime over
the millions of years that it has really had to work... 1 notes
notesA river formed the Grand Canyon, so we know that small processes can have huge effects given enough time.
25 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Time Fertile in Sciences is Scarce in Human History
For out of the five and twenty centuries over which the memory and learning of men extends, you can hardly pick out six that were fertile in sciences or favorable to their development. In times no less than in regions there are wastes and deserts. For only three revolutions and periods of learning can properly be reckoned: one among the Greeks, the second among the Romans, and the last among us, that is to say, the nations of Western Europe. And to each of these hardly two centuries can justl... 1 notes
notesFor out of the five and twenty centuries over which the memory and learning of men extends, you can hardly pick out six that were fertile in sciences or favorable to their development.
