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Todd Suomela

The Technium: The World Without Technology - 0 views

www.kk.org/...the_world_witho.php

technology technology-effects history anthropology language evolution culture archaeology

shared by Todd Suomela on 10 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Although strictly speaking simple tools are a type of technology made by one person, we tend to think of technology as something much more complicated. But in fact technology is anything designed by a mind. Technology includes not only nuclear reactors and genetically modified crops, but also bows and arrows, hide tanning techniques, fire starters, and domesticated crops. Technology also includes intangible inventions such as calendars, mathematics, software, law, and writing, as these too derive from our heads. But technology also must include birds' nests and beaver dams since these too are the work of brains. All technology, both the chimp's termite fishing spear and the human's fishing spear, the beaver's dam and the human's dam, the warbler's hanging basket and the human's hanging basket, the leafcutter ant's garden and the human's garden, are all fundamentally natural. We tend to isolate human-made technology from nature, even to the point of thinking of it as anti-nature, only because it has grown to rival the impact and power of its home. But in its origins and fundamentals a tool is as natural as our life.
  • The gravity of technology holds us where we are. We accept our attachment. But to really appreciate the effects of technology – both its virtues and costs -- we need to examine the world of humans before technology. What were our lives like without inventions? For that we need to peek back into the Paleolithic era when technology was scarce and humans lived primarily surrounded by things they did not make. We can also examine the remaining contemporary hunter-gatherer tribes still living close to nature to measure what, if anything, they gain from the small amount of technology they use.
  • Then about 50,000 years ago something amazing happened. While the bodies of early humans in Africa remained unchanged, their genes and minds shifted noticeably. For the first time hominins were full of ideas and innovation. These newly vitalized modern humans, which we now call Sapiens, charged into new regions beyond their ancestral homes in eastern Africa. They fanned out from the grasslands and in a relatively brief burst exploded from a few tens of thousands in Africa to an estimated 8 million worldwide just before the dawn of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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  • It should have been clear to Neanderthal, as it is now clear to us in the 21st century, that something new and big had appeared -- a new biological and geological force. A number of scientists (Richard Klein, Ian Tattersall, William Calvin, among many others) think that the "something" that happened 50,000 years ago was the invention of language. Up until this point, humanoids were smart. They could make crude tools in a hit or miss way and handle fire – perhaps like an exceedingly smart chimp. The African hominin's growing brain size and physical stature had leveled off its increase, but evolution continued inside the brain.  "What happened 50,000 years ago," says Klein, "was a change in the operating system of humans. Perhaps a point mutation effected the way the brain is wired that allowed languages, as we understand language today: rapidly produced, articulate speech."  Instead of acquiring a larger brain, as the Neanderthal and Erectus did, Sapien gained a rewired brain.  Language altered the Neanderthal-type mind, and allowed Sapien minds for the first time to invent with purpose and deliberation. Philosopher Daniel Dennet crows in elegant language: "There is no step more uplifting, more momentous in the history of mind design, than the invention of language. When Homo sapiens became the beneficiary of this invention, the species stepped into a slingshot that has launched it far beyond all other earthly species." The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. It changed everything. Life after language was unimaginable to those on the far side before it.
thinkahol *

Seeing Wildfires via Google Earth - 0 views

thefutureofthings.com/...ildfires-via-google-earth.html

Seeing Wildfires via Google Earth

shared by thinkahol * on 05 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 05 Jul 11
     
    Google, the U.S. Forest Service, and NASA have teamed up to make sure that people all over the world can see one of the largest forest fires in history via their personal computers.
Todd Suomela

Amateur Science and the Rise of Big Science | Citizen Scientists League - 0 views

citizenscientistsleague.com/...ce-and-the-rise-of-big-science

science amateur professional success citizen-science history government funding sts

shared by Todd Suomela on 04 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Several trends came together to increase the professional nature of scientific work. First was the increasing cost of scientific work and its complexity. Scientific equipment became more precise and expensive. Telescopes, like those by Herschel, became bigger and bigger. Also, the amount of knowledge one needed to gain to contribute became increasingly daunting.
  • Second, the universities changed. Pioneered by the German states, which at the beginning of the 19th century was dismissed as a scientific backwater, universities began offering focused majors which trained students in a specific discipline rather than classical education as a whole. This was pioneered by Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the famous scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who was the Prussian Minister of Education.
  • Germany, once united, also provided impetus to two other trends that accelerated their dominance of science and the decline of amateurs. First, was the beginning of large-scale state sponsorship of science through grants which were first facilitated through the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute (now the Max Planck Institute). This eventually supplanted prizes as the dominant large-scale source of scientific funding. Countries like France that relied on prizes began to fall behind. Second, was the intimate cooperation between industrial firms like BASF and universities.
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  • he final nail in the coffin was undoubtedly the Second World War. The massive mobilization of scientific resources needed to win and the discovery of war-winning inventions such as the atomic bomb and self-correcting bomb sight (with help from Norbert Wiener of MIT) convinced the nations of the world that the future was in large-scale funding and support of science as a continuous effort. Vannevar Bush, former president of MIT, and others pioneered the National Science Foundation and the military also invested heavily in its own research centers. Industrial labs such as those from Bell Labs, GE, Kodak, and others began dominating research as well. Interestingly, the first military investment in semiconductors coupled with research from Bell Labs led to what is now known as Silicon Valley.
Todd Suomela

Tom Johnson, 1923–2012 - News Blog - SkyandTelescope.com - 0 views

www.skyandtelescope.com/...son-xxxx1502012-142534025.html

amateur astronomy 20c technology optics history sts

shared by Todd Suomela on 17 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 17 Mar 12
     
    Thomas J. Johnson, the creator of the modern Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope and the founder of Celestron, died early this morning (March 13, 2012), according to Celestron president and CEO Joe Lupica. Johnson was 89. He ranked among the most important figures shaping the last half century of amateur astronomy.
Todd Suomela

Thatcher, Scientist - 0 views

rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/...215

politics science experience biography country(GreatBritain) 20c sts history

shared by Todd Suomela on 28 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 28 Feb 12
     
    This paper has two halves. First, I piece together what we know about Margaret Thatcher's training and employment as a scientist. She took science subjects at school; she studied chemistry at Oxford, arriving during World War II and coming under the influence (and comment) of two excellent women scientists, Janet Vaughan and Dorothy Hodgkin. She did a fourth-year dissertation on X-ray crystallography of gramicidin just after the war. She then gathered four years' experience as a working industrial chemist, at British Xylonite Plastics and at Lyons. Second, my argument is that, having lived the life of a working research scientist, she had a quite different view of science from that of any other minister responsible for science. This is crucial in understanding her reaction to the proposals-associated with the Rothschild reforms of the early 1970s-to reinterpret aspects of science policy in market terms. Although she was strongly pressured by bodies such as the Royal Society to reaffirm the established place of science as a different kind of entity-one, at least at core, that was unsuitable to marketization-Thatcher took a different line.
Todd Suomela

Scientific Explanation (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) - 0 views

plato.stanford.edu/...scientific-explanation

philosophy science history explanation theory model

shared by Todd Suomela on 06 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 06 Feb 09
     
    Reviews deductive-nomological (Popper, Hempel); statistical relevance (Salmon); causal mechanical; and unificationist (Friedman and Kitcher
Todd Suomela

Boltzmann's Anthropic Brain | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

cosmicvariance.com/...boltzmanns-anthropic-brain

physics philosophy time history science sts entropy import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Out of the background thermal equilibrium, a fluctuation randomly appears that collects some degrees of freedom into the form of a conscious brain, with just enough sensory apparatus to look around and say "Hey! I exist!", before dissolving back into
Todd Suomela

Electronic Musical Instrument 1870 - 1990 - 0 views

www.obsolete.com/120_years

music technology history sts electronic via:brucesterling import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    This site charts the development of electronic musical instruments from 1870 to 1990. For the purposes of this project electronic musical instruments are defined as instruments that synthesise sounds from an electronic source.
Todd Suomela

Guest Post: Tom Levenson on Isaac Newton as the First Cosmologist | Cosmic Variance - 0 views

cosmicvariance.com/...ewton-as-the-first-cosmologist

sts science history physics astronomy astrophysics

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Newton knew what he had done. He was no accidental writer. A parabola, of course, is a curve that keeps on going – and that meant that at the end of a very long and very dense book, he lifted off again from the hard ground of daily reality and said, in effect, look: All this math and all these physical ideas govern everything we can see, out to and past the point where we can’t see anymore. Most important, he did so with implacable rigor, a demonstration that, he argued, should leave no room for dissent. He wrote “The theory that corresponds exactly to so nonuniform a motion through the greatest part of the heavens, and that observes the same laws as the theory of the planets and that agrees exactly with exact astronomical observations cannot fail to be true.” (Italics added).
  • To make his ambitions absolutely clear Newton used the same phrase for the title of book three. There his readers would discover “The System of the World.” This is where the literary structure of the work really comes into play, in my view. Through book three, Newton takes his audience through a carefully constructed tour of all the places within the grasp of his new physics. It begins with an analysis of the moons of Jupiter, demonstrating that inverse square relationships govern those motions. He went on, to show how the interaction between Jupiter and Saturn would pull each out of a perfect elliptical orbit; the real world, he says here, is messier than a geometer’s dream.
Todd Suomela

MnCSE - Dancing with the Disco Institute - 0 views

www.mnscience.org/index.php

sts evolution biology philosophy history science eugenics intelligent-design import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    Historians of science know that the passage of the first sterilization laws at the beginning of the 20th century occurred during the "eclipse of Darwinism".
Todd Suomela

Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology - A Group Blog » The Road to ... - 0 views

savageminds.org/...ing-of-an-edited-volume-part-i

academic publishing anthropology history sts import-delicious

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09
     
    A few people said they'd like to hear about the process of getting my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA published.
Todd Suomela

The Bohr paradox - physicsworld.com - 0 views

physicsworld.com/...33963

physics sts history quantum-mechanics

shared by Todd Suomela on 25 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Why? The best explanation I have heard is advanced by the physicist John H Marburger, who is currently science advisor to US President George Bush. By 1930, Marburger points out, physicists had found a perfectly adequate way of representing classical concepts within the quantum framework using Hilbert (infinite-dimensional) space. Quantum systems, he says, “live” in Hilbert space, and the concepts of position and momentum, for instance, are associated with different sets of coordinate axes that do not line up with each other, thereby resulting in the situation captured in ordinary-language terms by complementarity.“It’s a clear, logical and consistent way of framing the complementarity issue,” Marburger explained to me. “It clarifies how quantum phenomena are represented in alternative classical ‘pictures’, and it fits in beautifully with the rest of physics. The clarity of this scheme removes much of the mysticism surrounding complementarity. What happened was like a gestalt-switch, from a struggle to view microscopic nature from a classical point of view to an acceptance of the Hilbert-space picture, from which classical concepts emerged naturally. Bohr brokered that transition.”
  • In his book Niels Bohr’s Times, the physicist Abraham Pais captures a paradox in his subject’s legacy by quoting three conflicting assessments. Pais cites Max Born, of the first generation of quantum physics, and Werner Heisenberg, of the second, as saying that Bohr had a greater influence on physics and physicists than any other scientist. Yet Pais also reports a distinguished younger colleague asking with puzzlement and scepticism “What did Bohr really do?”.
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