Fraction of Bachelor’s Degrees Earned by Women, by Major
via APS Physics
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Relevant to my interests.
Posts tagged science.
MIT edX: Classical Mechanics with Walter Lewin
8.01x is an online version of Classical Mechanics, which is the first of MIT’s introductory physics courses. In addition to the basic concepts of Newtonian mechanics, fluid mechanics, and kinetic gas theory, a variety of other interesting topics are covered, such as resonance phenomena, musical instruments, astronomical phenomena such as binary stars, neutron stars, black holes, stellar collapse, and supernovae. You will also be given a peek into the intriguing world of quantum mechanics.
Starts Sept. 9, 2013.
Reductionism vs Emergent Laws
The Feynman Series – Beauty (Part 1)
Biologists, Neuroscientists,
Hypothetically, what would you say to someone asking the “chicken or egg” question about neural chemistry: Does neurologocal/chemical/genetic information precede personality/responses/disposition or is it simply an expression of metaphysical “events”?
For example, those who believe in soul or karma and reincarnation, usually are more partial to the latter answer. For them, “chemistry” cannot possibly add up to the complex phenomenon they witness, therefore they accept the metaphysical answers more readily.
For a scientist, there may be other reasons to question “what came first,” but a metaphysical preference isn’t one of them. I wonder how valid the question is right now, for the scientific community.
It seems to me that we don’t yet know exactly how things add up to what we witness, and yet Evolutionary theory gives tells us that things were not even as organized as this, before. So the idea that there are some metaphysical absolutes that govern behavior seems a little silly, seeing how much behavior has changed over centuries and how much it differs between species (so long as we don’t take the anthropocentric stance, and do value the “morality”/experience/behavioral patterns of other species instead of casting that information aside and believing the “humans are special and endowed” paradigm.)
But back to it — how would you answer?
Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland ›
I’m concerned about this one. Kindle actually has a maximum of highlights one can make per book (I only found out while reading Infinite Jest, after highlighting pages at a time; probably to prevent copying) and I think I might reach it for this one. It’s really good.
Trial by ordeal seemed to me, as I learned about it in school, ridiculously unfair. How could it have endured as an institution in Europe for hundreds of years?
The central idea was simple: with God’s intervention, innocence would plainly reveal itself, as the accused thief sank to the bottom of the pond, or the accused adulterer remained unburned by the red hot poker placed in his hand. Only the guilty would drown or burn. (For witches, the ordeal was less “forgiving”: if the accused witch drowned she was presumed innocent; if she bobbed to the surface, she was guilty, whereupon she was hauled off to a waiting fire.)
With time on our hands, my friend and I concocted a plan. She would falsely accuse me of stealing her purse, and then I would lay my hand on the stove and see whether it burned. We fully expected it would burn, and it did. So if the test was that obvious, how could people have trusted to trial by ordeal as a system of justice?
Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland
Be Interested to Be Interesting
It’s funny when people say “you’re lucky you found something that you love doing.”
It reminds me of that thing Picasso supposedly said when some Parisian marveled at his 5-minute napkin drawing: “Sure it took 5 minutes… and forty years.” Quoted very loosely, but hopefully you get the idea. It’s a result of time and effort.
It’s also a strange thing to say (although I do understand what they mean) because it’s not like taking something from a grab-bag and deciding, “Oh yeah this one’s pretty good. I can do this.”
I used to think that way, as a child. I had no idea about the weight of things. There were fun things (like drawing) and horrible, boring things (like math). What depth was there? For a child, why not change your mind weekly: Teacher, Disney Animator, Doctor… What else? Same with subjects in school: all treated basically equally.
It’s only fairly recently that I started to see that maybe all’s not so equal at all. So when someone says “you’re lucky,” I wonder if they really don’t see it. It has nothing to do with luck. It’s just plain wonder. Taking a step back from living for a second, to wonder at it. Isn’t it WEIRD? Isn’t it interesting that you’re this bunch of non-sentient stuff that’s put together with some bits of code and rules and all of it comes together to make this “living” thing? Don’t you want to know more about that?
It’s unlike anything else, to wonder at that. You can say history is important or finances are important, but then it’s arbitrary human stuff. It could go this way or that, and have little effect on nature outside of our silly little planet. (Although we like to pretend otherwise, and superimpose biological feelings generally unique to our species onto the rest of the universe, with phrases like “Love conquers all.”) But there’s something you can learn about that does affect EVERYthing, regardless of planet or size or anything… Is that luck? It’s noticing. Finally noticing.
It’s important that humans have varied communities with members that have different skillsets in order to function, so we can’t possibly all have the same interests. But if you’re really wondering what to do with yourself, why revert to that grab-bag of subjects? Certainly sometimes circumstances dictate how you can proceed, but when you can make a choice, Why not Be Interested? There’s so much more outside of us…
It did seem that likely Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin were right: we are social by nature. But what does that actually mean in terms of our brains and our genes? To make progress beyond the broad hunches about our nature, we need something solid to attach the claim to.
Braintrust, by Patricia S. Churchland
The concept of the project I find useful. Something you do in the present, and can remember doing in the past, and expect to do in the future, in order to create something. A work of art which need not be in the arts per se, but something human worth doing.”
…
“That’s existentialism, yes?
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
Gravity, mysterious gravity, immutably following its own laws, interacts with matter, and somehow the result is complex motion. Invisible waves slinging rocks this way and that. What if human history has such invisible waves? Because ultimately the same forces apply. What big hits made us what we are? Will some new resonance create a wave and throw us in a new direction?
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
‘You are not the same person you used to be, you have to admit. You’ve stuffed your brain with augmentations … When you grow the religious part of the temporal lobe, you can turn into a very different person, not to mention risking epilepsy. And that was only the start. Now you’ve got the animal stuff in there, you’ve got Pauline in there, recording everything you see—it is not insignificant. It can do damage. You end up being some kind of post-human thing. Or at least a different person.’
…
‘Every thing I’ve done to myself I consider part of being a human being. I mean, who wouldn’t do it if they could? I would be ashamed not to! It isn’t being post human, it’s being fully human. It would be stupid not to do the good things when you can, it would be antihuman.’
2312, Kim Stanley Robinson
…they continued to grow — evidence of success. Mitalipov cancelled his holiday plans. “I was happy to spend Christmas culturing cells,” he says. “My family understood.
Shoukhrat Mitalipov, reproductive biology specialist
Human Stem Cells Created by Cloning
via Nature News
“Natural vs Artificial”, “Man vs Nature” — those are real points of conversation. It’s important that we begin to see through that facade, to create new mythologies that don’t pose that kind of polarity, because it’s going to be a problem if people think it’s a real thing in the world.
How many articles are there now, about how computers and the internet are changing our brains, when actually we’ve been changing our brains for much longer than that — it’s only the most obvious, accelerated changes that are noticed, and the rest pass by as if they never happened. As if we were “natural” before computers, natural before the 1950s, before the 1800s? When? Where is the line? As if these artificial things are not a part of nature…
as if We Are not Nature Itself, Creating.
Stories like Avatar (or Fern Gully, if you like) have their points, and those are important. But we need new stories — stories that contain a different point of view: that of artifice as a manifestation of nature.
Olena, RE: Steve Fuller, “It’s Time for Humanity 2.0”
Quoting myself. (lol). Had forgotten about this. It’s good, it holds true, and it needs to become something.
what if rocks are actually soft but just tense up when we touch them?
••••••
I haven’t looked at my dash in a while; I love that this was at the top upon logging in.
It may just be somebody’s “silly” question, and yet it reminds me so much of the questions central to quantum physics — important questions about the most basic elements (that we know of to date) that constitute our being.
Wonderful.
(via katisque)
