28 MAR 2012 by ideonexus
We Are Lucky Because We are Going to Die
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth ...Folksonomies: atheism
Folksonomies: atheism
So many people never even got to exist.
05 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
A Poem to Teach a Child
We live in an age of information. Too much information can swamp the boat of wonder, especially for a child.
From a science book we might learn that a flying bat might snap up 15 insects per minute, or that the frequency of its squeal can range as high as 50,000 cycles per second. Useful information, yes.
But consider the information in this poem from Randall Jarrell's "The Bat Poet":
A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale.
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He cling...We are drowning in facts, instead, give children wonder.
01 JAN 2012 by ideonexus
We Are Made of Star Stuff
The fate of individual human beings may not now be connected in a deep way
with the rest of the universe, but the matter out of which each of us is made is
intimately tied to processes that occurred immense intervals of time and
enormous distances in space away from us. Our Sun is a second- or third-generation
star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our
blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of
years ago in the interior of...This might be the original source of this quote.
16 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
Hen's Teeth
Some atavisms can be produced in the laboratory. The most amazing
of these is that paragon of rarity, hen’s teeth. In 1980, E. J. Kollar and
C. Fisher at the University of Connecticut combined the tissues of two
species, grafting the tissue lining the mouth of a chicken embryo on top
of tissue from the jaw of a developing mouse. Amazingly, the chicken
tissue eventually produced tooth-like structures, some with distinct roots
and crowns! Since the underlying mouse tissue alone could not prod...An experiment from 1980 that stimulated hens to grow teeth by triggering a gene holdover from their ancient reptilian ancestors.
10 AUG 2011 by ideonexus
The Eternal Conflict Between Enlightenment and Ignorance
‘There are two great powers,” the man said, “and they’ve been fighting since time began. Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.A shaman describes a more sophisticated clash than between good and evil, knowledge versus totalitarian ignorance.
06 JUL 2011 by ideonexus
Skinner and Freud's View of Child Learning
The theories that did dominate psychology, especially in America, were Freudianism and the behaviorism of psychologists like B. F. Skinner. Both theories had lots of things to say about young children. But like Aristotle with the teeth, neither Freud nor Skinner took the step of doing systematic experiments with children or babies. Freud largely relied on inferences from the behavior of neurotic adults, and Skinner on inferences from the behavior of only slightly less neurotic rats. And like ...Folksonomies: psychology inference
Folksonomies: psychology inference
They got it mostly wrong because they relied on a philosophical inference method of science.