21 JAN 2014 by ideonexus

 The Scientific Revolution Outshines the Rest of History

It [the Scientific Revolution] outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and the Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere intemal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom .... It looms so large as the real origin of the modem world and of the modem mentality that our customary periodisation of European history has become an anachronism and an encumbrance.
  1  notes

All else will be footnotes.

08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 The Marvelous Invention of Indian Arithematic

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped...
Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
Folksonomies: mathematics base-10
   notes

Quoting Pierre-Simon Laplace.

06 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Jefferson Sees Science Beginning a Revolution

Even in Europe a change has sensibly taken place in the mind of man. Science has liberated the ideas of those who read and reflect, and the American example has kindled feelings of right in the people. An insurrection has consequently begun of science talents and courage against rank and birth, which have fallen into contempt. It has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty and vice, could not be rest...
Folksonomies: science freedom
Folksonomies: science freedom
  1  notes

Against privilege and rank.

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

Aside from the Enlightenment, all other periods of European history are worthless in understanding how we got to the modern era.

18 APR 2011 by ideonexus

 Botany is Good for the Soul

Botany is a branch of Natural History that possesses many advantages; it contributes to health of body and cheerfulness of disposition, by presenting an inducement to take air and exercise; it is adapted to the simplest capacity, and the objects of its investigation offer themselves without expense or difficulty, which renders them attainable to every rank in life; but with all these allurements, till of late years, it has been confined to the circle of the leamed, which may be attributed to ...
Folksonomies: science botany well being
Folksonomies: science botany well being
  1  notes

It gets you out in the air and improves your mood.