Category Archives: Science
Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things
You’re not really all that different from a plant. Excerpted from the article “Plants Feel Pain and Might Even See: It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things” by Peter Wohlleben in Nautilis: After our first cup of coffee, we were soon deep into our main topic: trees and plants in general. Coccia …
In Flight
Stunningly beautiful!
Caffeine
I don’t drink, but I do love my coffee in the morning.
Perpetual Beginners
“Birdwatchers are a fussy, eccentric lot, especially perpetual beginners like myself, who seem condemned never to find a bird, anywhere, that corresponds precisely to its description and illustration in the bird books. A failing, on the part of the bird, difficult to forgive.” ~Edward Abbey, excerpted from Abbey’s Road, ©1979 I have the same problem, …
Faith
“Praying to the Lord in situations of calamity (for Him to modify them) only demonstrates how little faith we have in the arrangements He is making in our lives. The Lord arranges everything in the life of his devotee by His own desire, without being influenced by any other factor. Why should a devotee then …
Within You Without You
“The biggest development of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored.” ~J.G. Ballard, in 1962
Recreating
“It’s a question of removing the clouds, rather than recreating the sun.” ~Chögyam Trungpa
Luna
You can read more about Luna 2 at Wikipedia. You can visit XKCD on the web HERE.
Phonograph
In this excerpt from Americans: A Book of Lives ©1946. Hermann Hagedorn describes the moment Thomas Edison first tested his new invention to record and play back sounds: Three weeks after his interest had first been stirred, he (Thomas Edison) handed his chief mechanic a rough sketch of a queer-looking instrument, including a metal cylinder …
The Empathy Circuit
via JoshKornbluth.com.
Solitary Wanderer
Excerpted from The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, © 1957: It is curious in how great a degree human progress depends on the individual. Humans, numbered in thousands of millions, seem organized into an ant-like society. Yet this is not so. New ideas, the impetus of all development, come from individual people, not from corporations …
Poles
There’s a North Pole and a South Pole, but there’s not an East Pole or a West Pole. It would be very hard to give someone directions if you were standing at the North Pole, because every direction would be South. If you took a compass to the North Pole, it would point South. Magnetic …
A crystal to precipitate
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: All real scientists exist on the frontier. Even the least ambitious among them deal with the unknown, if only one step beyond the unknown. The best among them move deep into a wilderness region where they know almost nothing, where the very tools and …
The Narrow Confines
“One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one’s own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought. With this negative motive …
Probe Vertically, See Horizontally
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: The greatest challenge of science, its art, lies in asking an important question and framing it in a way that allows it to be broken into manageable pieces, into experiments that can be conducted that ultimately lead to answers. To this requires a certain …
A Kind of Perceived Truth
Excerpted from The Great Influenza by John M. Barry, © 2004: Indeed, methodology matters more than anything else. Methodology subsumes, for example, Thomas Khun’s well-known theory of how science advances. Kuhn gave the word “paradigm” wide usage by arguing that at any given point in time, a particular paradigm, a kind of perceived truth, dominates …
Bluebirds
Bluebirds In My House, by Arnette Heidcamp © 1997, was a fun little book that I’m glad I stumbled across. The first half is strictly a naturalist treatise about bluebirds, while the second half is her own personal experience raising two orphaned bluebird fledglings she found abandoned in the nest after the death of their …
Charm
The BBC recently posted an article on the science of being charming. Here, in summary, is how you do it: Smile Arch your eyebrows Mirror other’s body language Feign interest in their lives Maybe it’s an English thing, but it was interesting to me that they just assume you’ll have to pretend to be interested …
Mason Bees
This is cool!
Fossilized Compassion
This made me happy. Excerpted from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, ©2003: Also found at Lake Turkana by (Kamoya) Kimeu was KNM-ER 1808, a female 1.7 million years old, which gave scientists their first clue that Homo erectus was more interesting and complex than previously thought. The woman’s bones were deformed …
Abbie's Tree House 