27 JUL 2018 by ideonexus

 Fluid Intelligence has Made the Most Gains

So which kinds of intellectual performance have been pushed upward by the better environments of recent decades? Surprisingly, the steepest gains have not been found in the concrete skills that are directly taught in school, such as general knowledge, arithmetic, and vocabulary. They have been found in the abstract, fluid kinds of intelligence, the ones tapped by similarity questions (“What do an hour and a year have in common?”), analogies (“BIRD is to EGG as TREE is to what?”), and ...
Folksonomies: intelligence iq
Folksonomies: intelligence iq
  1  notes
 
29 SEP 2017 by ideonexus

 Roman Arithmetic

...basic Roman arithmetic is largely rather simple, even for those of us spoiled by Arabic notation. Addition is no sweat, because complex Roman numbers already use what math pros call additive notation, with numerals set beside one another to create a larger number. VI is just V plus I, after all. To add large numbers, simply pile all the letters together, arrange them in descending order, and there’s your sum. CLXVI plus CLXVI? CCLLXXVVII, or CCCXXXII. And one of the advantages of the Rom...
Folksonomies: education mathematics math
Folksonomies: education mathematics math
  1  notes
05 MAY 2015 by ideonexus

 Dawkin's Concept of Life

My vision of life is that everything extends from replicators, which are in practice DNA molecules on this planet. The replicators reach out into the world to influence their own probability of being passed on. Mostly they don't reach further than the individual body in which they sit, but that's a matter of practice, not a matter of principle. The individual organism can be defined as that set of phenotypic products which have a single route of exit of the genes into the future. That's not t...
Folksonomies: evolution replication life
Folksonomies: evolution replication life
  1  notes
 
06 JUN 2012 by ideonexus

 Genetics and Atomic Theory

Genetics is to biology what atomic theory is to physics. Its principle is clear: that inheritance is based on particles and not on fluids. Instead of the essence of each parent mixing, with each child the blend of those who made him, information is passed on as a series of units. The bodies of successive generations transport them through time, so that a long-lost character may emerge in a distant descendant. The genes themselves may be older than the species that bear them.
Folksonomies: analogy
Folksonomies: analogy
  1  notes

Are analogous in their relationships to biology and physics.

29 MAY 2012 by ideonexus

 The Relationship of Industrial Society to Knowledge

Industrial Society is not merely one containing 'industry,' large-scale productive units capable of supplying man's material needs in a way which can eliminate poverty: it is also a society in which knowledge plays a part wholly different from that which it played in earlier social forms, and which indeed possesses a quite different type of knowledge. Modern science is inconceivable outside an industrial society: but modern industrial society is equally inconceivable without modern science. R...
Folksonomies: science culture industrial
Folksonomies: science culture industrial
  1  notes

The two are codependent, one cannot exist without the other; therefore, our entire modern world relies on science.

23 APR 2012 by ideonexus

 The Lifetime of DNA

The messages that DNA molecules contain are all but eternal when seen against the time scale of individual lifetimes. The lifetimes of DNA messages (give or take a few mutations) are measured in units ranging from millions of years to hundreds of millions of years; or, in other words, ranging from 10,000 individual lifetimes to a trillion individual lifetimes. Each individual organism should be seen as a temporary vehicle, in which DNA messages spend a tiny fraction of their geological lifeti...
Folksonomies: evolution wonder dna
Folksonomies: evolution wonder dna
  1  notes

It exists in living messengers for brief periods of their lifetimes, but communicates across millions of years throughout all life.

08 JAN 2011 by ideonexus

 Replacing the Gold Standard with an Energy Standard

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that it is possible to use as a standard of monetary value no substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value might be measured in units of energy. An excellent development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static; it throws the old idea of the social order and the new into the sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of substa...
Folksonomies: economics
Folksonomies: economics
  1  notes

An interesting idea; however difficult to quantify. It does set monetary standards to something more practical than a rare metal or credit evaluations.