Contents contributed and discussions participated by qkirkpatrick - TOK Friends

shared by qkirkpatrick on 28 May 15 - No Cached

“YOU cannot ride this bicycle. You might think you can. But you can’t.”
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To be able to learn how to ride THIS bicycle, you have to un-learn everything you know about actually riding a bicycle.
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shared by qkirkpatrick on 12 May 15 - No Cached

shared by qkirkpatrick on 31 Mar 15 - No Cached

Sympathy is influenced by cultural differences, new Stanford research shows.
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The research showed that how much people wanted to avoid negative emotion influenced their expressions of sympathy more than how negative they actually felt, wrote Stanford psychology
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American sympathy cards contain less negative and more positive content than German sympathy cards.
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...5 more annotations...
Americans want to avoid negative states of mind more than Germans do.
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Cultural differences in how much people want to avoid negative emotions play a key role in how Americans and Germans feel about focusing on the negative rather than the positive when expressing sympathy.
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When people desire to avoid negative emotions, they focus less on the negative and more on the positive when responding to another person's suffering.
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suffering, according to the researchers. However, until now, Tsai said, no studies have specifically examined how culture shapes "different ways in which sympathy, compassion or other feelings of concern for another's suffering might be expressed."
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Unlike when Americans talk about illness, Germans primarily focus on the negative, Tsai and Koopmann-Holm wrote. For example, the "Sturm und Drang" ("Storm and Drive") literary and musical movement in 18th-century Germany went beyond merely accepting negative emotions to actually glorifying them.
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shared by qkirkpatrick on 10 Mar 15 - No Cached

So Einstein trumps Newton. But Einstein’s theory is much more difficult to work with than Newton’s, so often we just use Newton’s equations to calculate things. For example, the motion of satellites, or exoplanets. If we don’t need the precision of Einstein’s theory, we simply use Newton to get an answer that is “good enough.” We may have proven Newton’s theory “wrong”, but the theory is still as useful and accurate as it ever was.
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shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached

Two American Football stars say they will donate their brains for medical research after their deaths.
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Many former players in the sport suffer degenerative brain disease
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"There are a lot of issues that stem from brain injuries and it's not just professional athletes. This affects everybody,"
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About 4,500 former players are suing the National Football League (NFL) over head injuries suffered during their careers. They are close to a settlement worth about $1bn (£655m).
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Rice estimates he suffered between 15 and 20 concussions playing American Football from the age of eight.
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"I had my fair share of fun in the NFL," he said. "Unfortunately, I wasn't educated enough on what concussions can lead to. The brain studies by the doctors will be huge to help, maybe prevent."
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shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached

The question – and ensuing answers – elicited such passion and consternation that a war of words broke out on line before the scientists explained how two people, looking at the same image, may perceive color differently depending on our interpretation of ambient light cues
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perception, like it or not, is reality.
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s. The matter at hand includes soothing the jitters of now-wary customers and employees that it’s safe to visit, and that a bankruptcy doesn’t necessarily mean a business will soon go bust.
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The fight to change perception might leave some black and blue marks, but it’s one too important to ignor
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shared by qkirkpatrick on 09 Mar 15 - No Cached

A century ago this year, a young Swiss physicist, who had already revolutionized physics with discoveries about the relationship between space and time, developed a radical new understanding of gravity.
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He came up with a set of equations that relate the curvature of space-time to the energy and momentum of the matter and radiation that are present in a particular region.
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Today, 100 years later, Einstein's theory of gravitation remains a pillar of modern understanding, and has withstood all the tests that scientists could throw at it
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General relativity describes gravity not as a force, as the physicist Isaac Newton thought of it, but rather as a curvature of space and time due to the mass of objects
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The reason Earth orbits the sun is not because the sun attracts Earth, but instead because the sun warps space-time, he said
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