31 OCT 2018 by ideonexus

 Insights on Being Well-Read

What is the true point of a bookish life? Note I write “point,” not “goal.” The bookish life can have no goal: It is all means and no end. The point, I should say, is not to become immensely knowledgeable or clever, and certainly not to become learned. Montaigne, who more than five centuries ago established the modern essay, grasped the point when he wrote, “I may be a man of fairly wide reading, but I retain nothing.” Retention of everything one reads, along with being mentally i...
  1  notes
 
05 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Growth and Stages of Scientific Knowledge

In its earliest development knowledge is self-sown. Impressions force themselves upon men’s senses whether they will or not, and often against their will. The amount of interest in which these impressions awaken is determined by the coarser pains and pleasures which they carry in their train or by mere curiosity; and reason deals with the materials supplied to it as far as that interest carries it, and no further. Such common knowledge is rather brought than sought; and such ratiocination i...
Folksonomies: nature education knowledge
Folksonomies: nature education knowledge
  1  notes

Into aesthetic pleasure to recognizing the continuous series of causes in nature.

14 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Difference Between Vegetable and Animal

Thus it might be said, that the vegetable is only the sketch, nor rather the ground-work of the animal; that for the formation of the latter, it has only been requisite to clothe the former with an apparatus of external organs, by which it might be connected with external objects. From hence it follows, that the functions of the animal are of two very different classes. By the one (which is composed of an habitual succession of assimilation and excretion) it lives within itself, transforms i...
Folksonomies: life plant animal. taxonomy
Folksonomies: life plant animal. taxonomy
  1  notes

A lovely description.

04 JAN 2012 by ideonexus

 Chemists Live More Sweetly Than Persian Kings

The chemists are a strange class of mortals, impelled by an almost insane impulse to seek their pleasures amid smoke and vapour, soot and flame, poisons and poverty; yet among all these evils I seem to live so sweetly that may I die if I were to change places with the Persian king.
Folksonomies: knowledge wealth
Folksonomies: knowledge wealth
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Knowledge for its own sake is more satisfying than immense wealth.

20 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 Predators Prevent Their Prey from Suffering

The appointment of death by the agency of carnivora, as the ordinary termination of animal existence, appears therefore in its main results to be a dispensation of benevolence; it deducts much from the aggregate amount of the pain of universal death; it abridges, and almost annihilates, throughout the brute creation, the misery of disease, and accidental injuries, and lingering decay; and imposes such salutary restraint upon excessive increase of numbers, that the supply of food maintains per...
   notes

Stephen Jay Gould quoting the Reverend William Buckland.

18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus

 Intelligence and Nutrition

Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and the germ theory of disease drummed into them by the New York Public Schools. They followed prescriptions on childhood nutrition recommended by the US Department of Agriculture as if they ...
  1  notes

When confronted with malnutrition, the body deprives the brain of development.

23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 Cultural Impacts of Easy Access to Pornography on the Int...

The Internet is awash with sex. In a few hours, an innocent can see more of the pleasures and perversions of sex, in a greater number of close-up couplings, than a eighteenth century roué could experience in a lifetime devoted to illicit encounters. The Internet is the greatest sex education machine — or the greatest pornographer — that has ever existed. Having spent time teaching at a Muslim university, where the torrent of Internet sex was a hot topic, I would not underestimate its imp...
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What are the cultural and emotional impacts of the flood of pornography to people accessing the Internet?

23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 Memes and Genes in Conflict in Modern Child-Rearing

Let us suppose that women who have many chidren are far too busy to have much social life, and spend most of their time with their partners and family. The few other people they do see are likely to be other mothers with young children who already share at least some of their child-rearing memes. The more children they have the mor eyears they will spend this way. They will, therefore, have little time for spreading their own memes, including the ones concerned with family values and the ple...
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Women who have lots of children have less memetic influence, while women who are career-oriented have more memetic influence, but less genetic.