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Javier E

Is Science Kind of a Scam? - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...spooked-books-adam-gopnik

science knowledge physics einstein quantum facts social context history

shared by Javier E on 28 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • No well-tested scientific concept is more astonishing than the one that gives its name to a new book by the Scientific American contributing editor George Musser, “Spooky Action at a Distance
  • The ostensible subject is the mechanics of quantum entanglement; the actual subject is the entanglement of its observers.
  • his question isn’t so much how this weird thing can be true as why, given that this weird thing had been known about for so long, so many scientists were so reluctant to confront it. What keeps a scientific truth from spreading?
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  • it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)
  • fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.
  • The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.
  • Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,
  • What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.
  • “If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.
  • Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,
  • There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”
  • Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.
  • The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.
  • the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”
  • Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.
  • The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.
  • Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge
  • What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn
  • Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.
  • In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.
  • Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.
  • They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.
  • Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.
  • David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.
  • What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.
  • Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.
  • Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities
  • once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.
  • everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.
  • There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind
  • science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity
  • The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think
kushnerha

In Science, It's Never 'Just a Theory' - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...e-its-never-just-a-theory.html

new york times science theory education

shared by kushnerha on 09 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • In everyday conversation, we tend to use the word “theory” to mean a hunch, an idle speculation, or a crackpot notion.
  • That’s not what “theory” means to scientists.“In science, the word theory isn’t applied lightly,” Kenneth R. Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University, said. “It doesn’t mean a hunch or a guess. A theory is a system of explanations that ties together a whole bunch of facts. It not only explains those facts, but predicts what you ought to find from other observations and experiments.”
  • In 2002, the board of education in Cobb County, Ga., adopted the textbook but also required science teachers to put a warning sticker inside the cover of every copy.“Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things,” the sticker read, in part.In 2004, several Cobb County parents filed a lawsuit against the county board of education to have the stickers removed. They called Dr. Miller, who testified for about two hours, explaining, among other things, the strength of evidence for the theory of evolution.
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  • It’s helpful, he argues, to think about theories as being like maps.“To say something is a map is not to say it’s a hunch,” said Dr. Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the City University of New York and the University of Sydney. “It’s an attempt to represent some territory.”A theory, likewise, represents a territory of science. Instead of rivers, hills, and towns, the pieces of the territory are facts.“To call something a map is not to say anything about how good it is,” Dr. Godfrey-Smith added. “There are fantastically good maps where there’s not a shred of doubt about their accuracy. And there are maps that are speculative.”
  • To judge a map’s quality, we can see how well it guides us through its territory. In a similar way, scientists test out new theories against evidence. Just as many maps have proven to be unreliable, many theories have been cast aside.But other theories have become the foundation of modern science, such as the theory of evolution, the general theory of relativity, the theory of plate tectonics, the theory that the sun is at the center of the solar system, and the germ theory of disease.“To the best of our ability, we’ve tested them, and they’ve held up,” said Dr. Miller. “And that’s why we’ve held on to these things.”
Javier E

Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...557180

astrobiology alien civilization geology

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 18 - No Cached
  • When it comes to direct evidence of an industrial civilization—things like cities, factories, and roads—the geologic record doesn’t go back past what’s called the Quaternary period 2.6 million years ago
  • if we’re going back this far, we’re not talking about human civilizations anymore. Homo sapiens didn’t make their appearance on the planet until just 300,000 years or so ago. That means the question shifts to other species, which is why Gavin called the idea the Silurian hypothesis
  • could researchers find clear evidence that an ancient species built a relatively short-lived industrial civilization long before our own? Perhaps, for example, some early mammal rose briefly to civilization building during the Paleocene epoch about 60 million years ago. There are fossils, of course. But the fraction of life that gets fossilized is always minuscule and varies a lot depending on time and habitat. It would be easy, therefore, to miss an industrial civilization that only lasted 100,000 years—which would be 500 times longer than our industrial civilization has made it so far.
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  • Given that all direct evidence would be long gone after many millions of years, what kinds of evidence might then still exist? The best way to answer this question is to figure out what evidence we’d leave behind if human civilization collapsed at its current stage of development.
  • Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example
  • And then there’s all that plastic. Studies have shown increasing amounts of plastic “marine litter” are being deposited on the seafloor everywhere from coastal areas to deep basins and even in the Arctic. Wind, sun, and waves grind down large-scale plastic artifacts, leaving the seas full of microscopic plastic particles that will eventually rain down on the ocean floor, creating a layer that could persist for geological timescales.
  • Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too.
  • Once you realize, through climate change, the need to find lower-impact energy sources, the less impact you will leave. So the more sustainable your civilization becomes, the smaller the signal you’ll leave for future generations.
  • The more fossil fuels we burn, the more the balance of these carbon isotopes shifts. Atmospheric scientists call this shift the Suess effect, and the change in isotopic ratios of carbon due to fossil-fuel use is easy to see over the last century. Increases in temperature also leave isotopic signals. These shifts should be apparent to any future scientist who chemically analyzes exposed layers of rock from our era. Along with these spikes, this Anthropocene layer might also hold brief peaks in nitrogen, plastic nanoparticles, and even synthetic steroids
  • Fifty-six million years ago, Earth passed through the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). During the PETM, the planet’s average temperature climbed as high as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above what we experience today. It was a world almost without ice, as typical summer temperatures at the poles reached close to a balmy 70 degrees Fahrenheit.
  • While there is evidence that the PETM may have been driven by a massive release of buried fossil carbon into the air, it’s the timescale of these changes that matter. The PETM’s isotope spikes rise and fall over a few hundred thousand years. But what makes the Anthropocene so remarkable in terms of Earth’s history is the speed at which we’re dumping fossil carbon into the atmosphere. There have been geological periods where Earth’s CO2 has been as high or higher than today, but never before in the planet’s multibillion-year history has so much buried carbon been dumped back into the atmosphere so quickly
  • So the isotopic spikes we do see in the geologic record may not be spiky enough to fit the Silurian hypothesis’s bill.
  • ronically, however, the most promising marker of humanity’s presence as an advanced civilization is a by-product of one activity that may threaten it most.
  • “How do you know we’re the only time there’s been a civilization on our own planet?”
Javier E

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings - NYTimes.com - 1 views

opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/...ding-a-nation-of-know-nothings

partisan misinformation truth knowledge ignorance US press

shared by Javier E on 26 Aug 10 - Cached
  • It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.
  • Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate. Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.
  • It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy.
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  • So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence? But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.
  • Javier E on 26 Aug 10
     
    A major part of the US population now accepts denies basic facts, influenced by a deliberate partisan misinformation campaign tolerated by the press.
Javier E

Liu Cixin's War of the Worlds | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...liu-cixins-war-of-the-worlds

china science fiction realpolitik psychology science

shared by Javier E on 20 Jun 19 - No Cached
  • he briskly dismissed the idea that fiction could serve as commentary on history or on current affairs. “The whole point is to escape the real world!” he said.
  • Chinese tech entrepreneurs discuss the Hobbesian vision of the trilogy as a metaphor for cutthroat competition in the corporate world; other fans include Barack Obama, who met Liu in Beijing two years ago, and Mark Zuckerberg. Liu’s international career has become a source of national pride. In 2015, China’s then Vice-President, Li Yuanchao, invited Liu to Zhongnanhai—an off-limits complex of government accommodation sometimes compared to the Kremlin—to discuss the books and showed Liu his own copies, which were dense with highlights and annotations.
  • In China, one of his stories has been a set text in the gao kao—the notoriously competitive college-entrance exams that determine the fate of ten million pupils annually; another has appeared in the national seventh-grade-curriculum textbook. When a reporter recently challenged Liu to answer the middle-school questions about the “meaning” and the “central themes” of his story, he didn’t get a single one right. “I’m a writer,” he told me, with a shrug.
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  • Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize
  • “The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.
  • Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional
  • Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum
  • The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre
  • Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”
  • Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.
  • Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”
  • Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.
  • Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future
  • The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”
  • Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good
  • In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.
  • “I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”
  • Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”
  • Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”
  • It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes
  • “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.
  • Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”
  • “We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”
anonymous

This Is Your Brain on Junk Food: In 'Hooked,' Michael Moss Explores Addiction - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hooked-junk-food.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • This Is Your Brain on Junk Food
  • Yet after writing the book, Mr. Moss was not convinced that processed foods could be addictive.
  • In a legal proceeding two decades ago, Michael Szymanczyk, the chief executive of the tobacco giant Philip Morris, was asked to define addiction.
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  • “My definition of addiction is a repetitive behavior that some people find difficult to quit,”
  • Mr. Szymanczyk was speaking in the context of smoking. But a fascinating new book by Michael Moss, an investigative journalist and best-selling author, argues that the tobacco executive’s definition of addiction could apply to our relationship with another group of products that Philip Morris sold and manufactured for decades: highly processed foods.
  • In his new book, “Hooked,” Mr. Moss explores the science behind addiction and builds a case that food companies have painstakingly engineered processed foods to hijack the reward circuitry in our brains, causing us to overeat and helping to fuel a global epidemic of obesity and chronic disease.
  • Mr. Moss suggests that processed foods like cheeseburgers, potato chips and ice cream are not only addictive, but that they can be even more addictive than alcohol, tobacco and drugs.
  • In another cynical move, Mr. Moss writes, food companies beginning in the late 1970s started buying a slew of popular diet companies, allowing them to profit off our attempts to lose the weight we gained from eating their products.
  • Heinz, the processed food giant, bought Weight Watchers in 1978 for $72 million. Unilever, which sells Klondike bars and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, paid $2.3 billion for SlimFast in 2000. Nestle, which makes chocolate bars and Hot Pockets, purchased Jenny Craig in 2006 for $600 million. And in 2010 the private equity firm that owns Cinnabon and Carvel ice cream purchased Atkins Nutritionals, the company that sells low-carb bars, shakes and snacks. Most of these diet brands were later sold to other parent companies.
  • “The food industry blocked us in the courts from filing lawsuits claiming addiction; they started controlling the science in problematic ways, and they took control of the diet industry,”
  • “I’ve been crawling through the underbelly of the processed food industry for 10 years and I continue to be stunned by the depths of the deviousness of their strategy to not just tap into our basic instincts, but to exploit our attempts to gain control of our habits.”
  • The book explained how companies formulate junk foods to achieve a “bliss point” that makes them irresistible and market those products using tactics borrowed from the tobacco industry.
  • In the 1980s, Philip Morris acquired Kraft and General Foods, making it the largest manufacturer of processed foods in the country, with products like Kool-Aid, Cocoa Pebbles, Capri Sun and Oreo cookies.
  • “I had tried to avoid the word addiction when I was writing ‘Salt Sugar Fat,’” he said. “I thought it was totally ludicrous. How anyone could compare Twinkies to crack cocaine was beyond me.”
  • Witness
  • But as he dug into the science that shows how processed foods affect the brain, he was swayed
  • In “Hooked,” Michael Moss explores how no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods.
  • The faster it hits our reward circuitry, the stronger its impact.
  • That is why smoking crack cocaine is more powerful than ingesting cocaine through the nose, and smoking cigarettes produces greater feelings of reward than wearing a nicotine patch
  • : Smoking reduces the time it takes for drugs to hit the brain.
  • But no addictive drug can fire up the reward circuitry in our brains as rapidly as our favorite foods, Mr. Moss writes. “The smoke from cigarettes takes 10 seconds to stir the brain, but a touch of sugar on the tongue will do so in a little more than a half second, or six hundred milliseconds, to be precise,
  • This puts the term “fast food” in a new light. “Measured in milliseconds, and the power to addict, nothing is faster than processed food in rousing the brain,” he added.
  • Mr. Moss explains that even people in the tobacco industry took note of the powerful lure of processed foods.
  • One crucial element that influences the addictive nature of a substance and whether or not we consume it compulsively is how quickly it excites the brain.
  • As litigation against tobacco companies gained ground in the 1990s, one of the industry’s defenses was that cigarettes were no more addictive than Twinkies.
  • It may have been on to something.
  • “Smoking was given an 8.5, nearly on par with heroin,” Mr. Moss writes. “But overeating, at 7.3, was not far behind, scoring higher than beer, tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
  • But processed foods are not tobacco, and many people, including some experts, dismiss the notion that they are addictive. Mr. Moss suggests that this reluctance is in part a result of misconceptions about what addiction entails.
  • For one, a substance does not have to hook everyone for it to be addictive.
  • Studies show that most people who drink or use cocaine do not become dependent
  • Nor does everyone who smokes or uses painkillers become addicted.
  • Mr. Moss said that people who struggle with processed food can try simple strategies to conquer routine cravings, like going for a walk, calling a friend or snacking on healthy alternatives like a handful of nuts. But for some people, more extreme measures may be necessary.
  • “It depends where you are on the spectrum,” he said. “I know people who can’t touch a grain of sugar without losing control. They would drive to the supermarket and by the time they got home their car would be littered with empty wrappers. For them, complete abstention is the solution.”
  • anonymous on 26 Mar 21
     
    Really interesting!! How food affects your brain:
anonymous

Opinion | The Pandemic and the Future City - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cities-covid-remote-work.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The Pandemic and the Future City
  • Lessons from Alexander Hamilton and the book trade.
  • In 1957 Isaac Asimov published “The Naked Sun,” a science-fiction novel about a society in which people live on isolated estates, their needs provided by robots and they interact only by video
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • how will we live once the pandemic subsides?
  • First, it seems safe to predict that we won’t fully return to the way we used to live and work.
  • A year of isolation has, in effect, provided remote work with a classic case of infant industry protection, a concept usually associated with international trade policy that was first systematically laid out by none other than Alexander Hamilton.
  • never coming close to overtaking physical books
  • Given a break from competition, for example through temporary tariffs, these industries could acquire enough experience and technological sophistication to become competitive
  • the pandemic, by temporarily making our former work habits impossible, has clearly made us much better at exploiting the possibilities of remote work, and some of what we used to do — long commutes so we can sit in cubicles, constant flying to meetings of dubious value — won’t be coming back.
  • f history is any guide, however, much of our old way of working and living will, in fact, return.
  • what the internet did and didn’t do to the way we read books.
  • Hamilton asserted that there were many industries that could flourish in the young United States but couldn’t get off the ground in the face of imports.
  • And while big chains have suffered, independent bookstores have actually been flourishing.
  • for many readers this convenience is offset by subtler factors. The experience of reading a physical book is different and, for many, more enjoyable than reading e-ink.
  • what I find in a bookstore, especially a well-curated independent store, are books I wasn’t looking for but end up treasuring.
  • The remote work revolution will probably play out similarly, but on a much vaster scale.
  • The advantages of remote work — either from home or, possibly, in small offices located far from dense urban areas — are obvious.
  • Both living and work spaces are much cheaper; commutes are short or nonexistent; you no longer need to deal with the expense and discomfort of formal business wear, at least from the waist down.
  • The advantages of going back to in-person work will, by contrast, be relatively subtle — the payoffs from face-to-face communication, the serendipity that can come from unscheduled interactions, the amenities of urban life.
  • But these subtle advantages are, in fact, what drive the economies of modern cities
  • until Covid-19 struck these advantages were feeding a growing economic divergence between large, highly educated metropolitan areas and the rest of the country
  • We may commute to the office less than we used to; there may well be a glut of urban office space. But most of us won’t be able to stay very far from the madding crowd.
jmfinizio

Opinion: Gaming the vaccine system to jump the line isn't fair - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

vaccine cnn system opinion

shared by jmfinizio on 15 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • the Department of Health and Human Services announced a change in its Covid-19 vaccine distribution plan, an effort step up the grossly insufficient number of vaccinations that have been administered to date.
  • the administration will now release all available doses of the vaccine.
  • well-connected friends and community members who have managed to get vaccinated against Covid-19, even though they meet no current criteria to join the front of the line.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • those at highest risk for getting sick from Covid-19, either because of their job or their underlying health status, should get first dibs.
  • These guidelines are supported by bioethical principles about the need to balance "priorities of minimizing societal disruption and preventing morbidity and mortality."
  • As a result, the system is open to manipulation
  • A first distribution option is to treat vaccination like a class list.
  • seniors lined up overnight to get the shot, putting their own health at risk for the chance to avert future infections.
  • This strategy clearly prioritizes those who are in-the-know, who have time to sit on hold, or who are willing (in the case of camping out overnight) to put their health at risk.
  • it's the conditions of scarcity that make fairness difficult to achieve.
  • Whether it's using the National Guard to assist in setting up vaccination centers, deploying mobile vans to access rural and urban populations, or working with community groups to increase uptake among at-risk populations, better is needed.
  • we must release all the available doses of the Covid-19 vaccines
  • To protect our communities, we must not be paralyzed by fairness -- or stop pursuing it.
caelengrubb

How Galileo Galilei's discoveries helped create modern science - 0 views

www.zmescience.com/...ilei-life-achievements-feature

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Few people in history can claim as large a contribution to how we conduct and think about science as Galileo. His work revolutionized our entire outlook on what it means to study nature (and got him in some very hot water with the Roman Inquisition)
  • He is perhaps best known for his championing of Copernicus’ heliocentric model (the one that says the Earth and other planets orbit the Sun), but that is by no means the full extent of his legacy. Far, far from it.
  • Galileo earned himself a place among the stars as Europe’s global navigation satellite system bears his name
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  • Galileo is certainly among the titans of science — in many ways, he’s one of its ‘founders’. His legacy includes contributions to the fields of physics, astronomy, math, engineering, and the application of the scientific method
  • He was an accomplished mathematician and inventor, designing (among others) several military compasses and the thermoscope. He was also the one to pick up the torch of modern astronomy from Copernicus, cementing the foundations of this field of study by proving his theories right.
  • Showing others what science can do, and how one should go about it, is Galileo’s most important achievement. Its effects still ripple through the lives of every researcher to this day
  • Since the days of Aristotle, scholars in Europe believed that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Galileo showed that this wasn’t the case, using balls of the same materials but different weights and sizes. In one of his infamous experiments, he dropped two such balls from the top of the leaning tower of Pisa to show that objects of different weights accelerate just as fast towards the ground (air resistance notwithstanding).
  • The truth is Galileo’s experiments in this area used a more reliable but less flashy bunch of inclined planes that he rolled balls down on.
  • His interest regarding motion and the falling of objects were tightly linked to Galileo’s interest in planets, stars, and the solar system.
  • Apart from his theoretical pursuits, Galileo was also an accomplished engineer — meaning he could also turn his knowledge to the solving of practical problems. Most of these, historical accounts tell us, were attempts by Galileo to earn a little bit of extra cash in order to support his extended family after his father passed away.
  • Among his creations are a set of military compasses (sectors) that were simple enough for artillery crews and surveyors to use.
  • He was also an early builder and user of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo, among a few select others, was the first to ever use a refracting telescope as an instrument to observe heavenly bodies, in 1609
  • His fascination with celestial bodies and defense of the heliocentric model is what eventually led to the Inquisition cracking down on him and his works.
caelengrubb

How Isaac Newton Changed the World | Live Science - 0 views

www.livescience.com/saac-newton-changed-world.html

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  • To the probable dismay of some befuddled calculus and physics students the world over, Isaac Newton didn't just live, he grew up and lived long enough to become the single-most influential scientist of the 17th-century.
  • Newton's wide range of discoveries, from his theories of optics to his groundbreaking work on the laws of motion and gravity, formed the basis for modern physics.
  • The true genius of his work, experts think, is how he ultimately took those theories and applied them to the universe at large, explaining the motions of the Sun and planets in a way that had never been done before.
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  • Upon getting bumped on the head by a falling apple, Newton airily dreams up the laws of gravity and the rest, as they say, is history
  • When the black plague closed Cambridge University, where he was a student, for two years starting in 1665, he spent the long months locked up at home studying complex mathematics, physics and optics.
  • It was during this fruitful time that Newton, with the help of a crystal prism, became the first to discover that white light is made up a spectrum of colors
  • He also developed the concept of infinite-series calculus, the kind of scary math studied today by engineering and statistics scholars.
  • By 1666, Newton had even laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students everywhere:An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.The relationship between acceleration and applied force is F=ma.For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
  • Across the pages of the Principia, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system into "'simple"' equations, explaining away the nature of planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies.
caelengrubb

What Johannes Kepler Got Wrong - 0 views

www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/what-johannes-kepler-got-wrong

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • ohannes Kepler was one of the leading characters in the history of astronomy. His most famous achievement was the three laws of planetary motion, still taught in courses today. However, like all other human beings, he was not perfect and made mistakes
  • Johannes Kepler was one of the most influential figures in the history of astronomy. His three laws of planetary movement changed the world of science significantly and became a foundation for other scientists to build theories upon.
  • Nonetheless, there are theories in his past that are not even close to reality.
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  • In 1609, Kepler published a book containing the first two laws. The book also revealed his new model of the solar system, which was against what most scientists back then believed.
  • He stated that planets moved in elliptical orbits through the solar system, with the Sun located at one focus of the ellipse. Before Kepler, they believed that all orbits in the solar system were perfectly circular.
  • About ten years later, Kepler added his third law: that square of the orbital period divided by the cube of orbit’s semi-major axis is the same for all planets. Although not immediately accepted, his three laws took science to the next level. Why was he initially not appreciated?
  • Kepler applied this to the planets and stated that the solar system was built upon geometrical objects called Platonic solids that are a specific type of three-dimensional shape. They have identical sides or surfaces, edges of equal length, and angles of equal extent.
  • The model Kepler presented was based on a sequence of six spheres and the five Platonic solids, each located between two spheres. Back then, only six planets were discovered as Uranus and Neptune’s discovery took until the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus, each sphere represented one planet.
  • nitially, it seemed to explain the approximate ratios of the orbits of the six planets. It also gave a reason why there are only six planets—because there are only five Platonic shapes, each of which needs to fit between the orbit of two planets, only once
  • Kepler published this theory in detail, in his book Mysterium Cosmographicum. Despite all the value he gave to this theory, we now know how wrong it was.
  • Kepler cherished the theory as his most significant work, long after he had discovered the three laws.
  • However, the number of planets in the solar system or any other system in the universe is not predictable. Many of the numbers appearing everywhere are out of a mere accident, just like the number of planets.
  • Kepler thought his greatest achievement was the wrong solar system he drew, but it was the three laws that were so right to survive to date.
caelengrubb

February 2016: 400 Years Ago the Catholic Church Prohibited Copernicanism | Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective - 0 views

origins.osu.edu/...hurch-prohibited-copernicanism

shared by caelengrubb on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • In February-March 1616, the Catholic Church issued a prohibition against the Copernican theory of the earth’s motion.
  • This led later (1633) to the Inquisition trial and condemnation of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) as a suspected heretic, which generated a controversy that continues to our day.
  • In 1543, Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres. This book elaborated the (geokinetic and heliocentric) idea that the earth rotates daily on its own axis and revolves yearly around the sun
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  • Since antiquity, this idea had been considered but rejected in favor of the traditional (geostatic and geocentric) thesis that the earth stands still at the center of the universe.
  • The objections to the geokinetic and heliocentric idea involved astronomical observations, the physics of motion, biblical passages, and epistemological principles (e.g., the reliability of human senses, which reveal a stationary earth)
  • The Inquisition launched an investigation. Galileo’s writings were evaluated and other witnesses interrogated. The charges against Galileo were unsubstantiated. However, the officials started worrying about the status of heliocentrism and consulted a committee of experts.
  • These discoveries did not conclusively prove Copernicanism, but provided new evidence in its favor and refutations of some old objections.
  • Galileo became more explicit in his pursuit of heliocentrism, and this soon got him into trouble.
  • In February-March 1615, one Dominican friar filed a written complaint against him, and another one testified in person in front of the Roman Inquisition. They accused Galileo of heresy, for believing in the earth’s motion, which contradicted Scripture, e.g., the miracle in Joshua 10:12-13.
  • Copernicus did not really refute these objections, but he elaborated a novel and important astronomical argument. Thus, Copernicanism attracted few followers. At first, Galileo himself was not one of them, although he was interested because his new physics enabled him to answer the mechanical objections.
  • On February 24, 1616, the consultants unanimously reported the assessment that heliocentrism was philosophically (i.e., scientifically) false and theologically heretical or at least erroneous.
  • The following day, the Inquisition, presided by Pope Paul V, considered the case. Although it did not endorse the heresy recommendation, it accepted the judgments of scientific falsity and theological error, and decided to prohibit the theory.
  • the Church was going to declare the idea of the earth’s motion false and contrary to Scripture, and so this theory could not be held or defended. Galileo agreed to comply.
  • Without mentioning Galileo, it publicly declared the earth’s motion false and contrary to Scripture. It prohibited the reading of Copernicus’s Revolutions, and banned a book published in 1615 by Paolo Antonio Foscarini; he had argued that the earth’s motion was probably true, and certainly compatible with Scripture.
  • The 1616 condemnation of Copernicanism was bad enough for the relationship between science and religion, but the problems were compounded by Galileo’s trial 17 years later.
  • Galileo kept quiet until 1623, when a new pope was elected, Urban VIII, who was a great admirer of Galileo.
  • The Inquisition summoned him to Rome, and the trial proceedings lasted from April to June 1633. He was found guilty of suspected heresy, for defending the earth’s motion, and thus denying the authority of Scripture.
  • “Suspected heresy” was not as serious a religious crime as “formal heresy,” and so his punishment was not death by being burned at the stake, but rather house arrest and the banning of the Dialogue.
  • The Church’s condemnation of Copernicanism and Galileo became the iconic illustration of the problematic relationship between science and religion.
  • This controversy will probably not end any time soon. This may be seen from Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’, with its focus on climate change. Whatever its merits, it could be criticized for having failed to learn, from the Galileo affair, the lesson that the Church should be wary of interfering in scientific matters.
caelengrubb

8 Things You May Not Know About Galileo - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...you-may-not-know-about-galileo

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  • When he was 16, Galileo enrolled at the University of Pisa to study medicine, at his father’s urging. Instead, though, he became interested in mathematics and shifted his focus to that subjec
  • Galileo left the school in 1585 without earning a degree.
  • Galileo didn’t invent the telescope—Dutch eyeglass maker Hans Lippershey is generally credited with its creation—but he was the first person to use the optical instrument to systematically study the heavens.
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  • In 1609, Galileo learned about the device and developed one of his own, significantly improving its design. That fall, he pointed it at the moon and discovered it had craters and mountains, debunking the common belief that the moon’s surface was smooth.
  • Galileo soon went on to make other findings with his telescope, including that there were four moons orbiting Jupiter and that Venus went through a complete set of phases (indicating the planet traveled around the sun).
  • Galileo had three children with a woman named Marina Gamba, who he never married. In 1613, he placed his two daughters, Virginia, born in 1600, and Livia, born in 1601, in a convent near Florence, where they remained for the rest of their lives, despite their father’s eventual troubles with the Catholic Church
  • Copernicus’ heliocentric theory about the way the universe works challenged the widely accepted belief, espoused by the astronomer Ptolemy in the second century, that put the Earth at the center of the solar system.
  • Galileo received permission from the Church to continue investigating Copernicus’ ideas, as long as he didn’t hold or defend them.
  • As a result, the following year Galileo was ordered to stand trial before the Inquisition in Rome
  • After being found guilty of heresy, Galileo was forced to publicly repent and sentenced to life in prison.
  • Although Galileo was given life behind bars, his sentence soon was changed to house arrest. He lived out his final years at Villa Il Gioiello (“the Jewel”), his home in the town of Arcetri, near Florence
  • In 1979, Pope John Paul II initiated an investigation into the Catholic Church’s condemnation of Galileo.
  • Thirteen years later, and 359 years after Galileo was tried by the Inquisition, the pope officially closed the investigation and issued a formal apology in the case, acknowledging that errors were made by the judges during the trial.
caelengrubb

How Did Language Begin? | Linguistic Society of America - 0 views

www.linguisticsociety.org/...how-did-language-begin

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  • The question is not how languages gradually developed over time into the languages of the world today. Rather, it is how the human species developed over time so that we - and not our closest relatives, the chimpanzees and bonobos - became capable of using language.
  • Human language can express thoughts on an unlimited number of topics (the weather, the war, the past, the future, mathematics, gossip, fairy tales, how to fix the sink...). It can be used not just to convey information, but to solicit information (questions) and to give orders.
  • Every human language has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words, built up from several dozen speech sounds
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  • Animal communication systems, in contrast, typically have at most a few dozen distinct calls, and they are used only to communicate immediate issues such as food, danger, threat, or reconciliation. Many of the sorts of meanings conveyed by chimpanzee communication have counterparts in human 'body language'.
  • The basic difficulty with studying the evolution of language is that the evidence is so sparse. Spoken languages don't leave fossils, and fossil skulls only tell us the overall shape and size of hominid brains, not what the brains could do
  • All present-day languages, including those of hunter-gatherer cultures, have lots of words, can be used to talk about anything under the sun, and can express negation. As far back as we have written records of human language - 5000 years or so - things look basically the same.
  • According to current thinking, the changes crucial for language were not just in the size of the brain, but in its character: the kinds of tasks it is suited to do - as it were, the 'software' it comes furnished with.
  • So the properties of human language are unique in the natural world.
  • About the only definitive evidence we have is the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue, and throat): Until anatomically modern humans, about 100,000 years ago, the shape of hominid vocal tracts didn't permit the modern range of speech sounds. But that doesn't mean that language necessarily began the
  • Some researchers even propose that language began as sign language, then (gradually or suddenly) switched to the vocal modality, leaving modern gesture as a residue.
  • . In an early stage, sounds would have been used to name a wide range of objects and actions in the environment, and individuals would be able to invent new vocabulary items to talk about new things
  • In order to achieve a large vocabulary, an important advance would have been the ability to 'digitize' signals into sequences of discrete speech sounds - consonants and vowels - rather than unstructured calls.
  • These two changes alone would yield a communication system of single signals - better than the chimpanzee system but far from modern language. A next plausible step would be the ability to string together several such 'words' to create a message built out of the meanings of its parts.
  • This has led some researchers to propose that the system of 'protolanguage' is still present in modern human brains, hidden under the modern system except when the latter is impaired or not yet developed.
  • Again, it's very hard to tell. We do know that something important happened in the human line between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago: This is when we start to find cultural artifacts such as art and ritual objects, evidence of what we would call civilization.
  • One tantalizing source of evidence has emerged recently. A mutation in a gene called FOXP2 has been shown to lead to deficits in language as well as in control of the face and mouth. This gene is a slightly altered version of a gene found in apes, and it seems to have achieved its present form between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago.
  • Nevertheless, if we are ever going to learn more about how the human language ability evolved, the most promising evidence will probably come from the human genome, which preserves so much of our species' history. The challenge for the future will be to decode it.
mshilling1

Isaac Newton's Influence on Modern Science - 0 views

www.thegreatcoursesdaily.com/ns-influence-on-modern-science

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  • Aristotelian thought had dominated mathematics and astronomy for centuries, until revolutionaries like Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei challenged those views.
  • The mathematization of physics was a crucial step in the advancement of science. It was realized that the mathematical tools we had at the time weren’t strong enough.
  • By trial and error, Kepler worked and worked until finally, he hit upon the shape that worked—elliptical orbits with the Sun at one focus. It turned out to perfectly fit the known observations.
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  • They were stunning results, but no one knew why they would be true. Aristotle’s circular orbits had a philosophical basis—the perfection of the aether from which everything out there was made.
  • The basic concepts which ordered the universe and the picture of reality they gave rise to had become wobbly, but had not fallen.
  • So, the first law describes the behavior of an object subjected to no external force. The second law then describes the behavior of an object that is subjected to an external force.
  • And so Newton’s success supercharged an intellectual movement developing around him, the Enlightenment. The picture of reality that emerged from the Enlightenment is one in which the universe is well-ordered according to principles that are accessible to the human mind.
  • Again, if a person is on ice skates and someone pushes them, they accelerate forward because of the force and the other person goes backwards because of it. To every action there is always an equal, but opposite reaction.
  • When these three laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation are used together, we suddenly have an explanation for Kepler’s elliptical orbits. Not only that, we can explain the tides, the motion of cannonballs, virtually everything we see in the world around us.
  • When these three laws of mechanics and the law of universal gravitation are used together, it was not only successful in terms of explaining and predicting, but, theoretically, it also undermined the old foundation—Aristotle.
  • Newton’s law of universal gravitation is universal. It applies to everything equally. Aristotle’s worldview was enforced by the centralized power of the Catholic Church. Newton’s worldview came not from authority, but from observing, something anyone could do.
  • The bigger the push, the more the change; the heavier the object, the less the change. An object is either subject to a force or it isn’t, so the first two laws are sufficient to describe the behavior of the object.
  • We live in a world that we can understand. Humans are perfectly rational beings, made to understand the world we inhabit.
Javier E

What's known as 'mental reframing' can help us with all kinds of physical and psychological challenges - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...b-a931-5b162d0d033d_story.html

psychology research brain science mental health interpretation

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  • Leibowitz moved to the Arctic to learn how Scandinavians don’t just survive but thrive during the long winters. The sun doesn’t rise at all in the far north for two months, but she noted that Norwegians have comparable rates of seasonal depression to those of us in the United States.
  • Her research found that a positive mind-set — the result of reframing — is associated with well-being, greater life satisfaction and more positive emotions like pleasure and happiness. Accepting the inevitable helps, too — as a yoga teacher once told my class, “Let go or be dragged down.
  • “People who see stressful events as ‘challenges,’ with an opportunity to learn and adapt, tend to cope much better than those who focus more on the threatening aspects — like the possibility of failure, embarrassment or illness,”
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  • mental framing can not only impact our mental health but also result in physiological differences — for instance, changes in blood pressure and heart rate — and our capacity to recover more quickly after a challenging situation.
katherineharron

Potential super-Earth found orbiting the nearest star from our sun - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

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  • In 2016, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet called Proxima b around the star Proxima Centauri, which is only 4.2 light-years from Earth. Now, researchers have traced a second signal they believe belongs to a super-Earth orbiting the same star, increasing the intrigue of this neighboring planetary system and its potential.
  • After the discovery of the first planet around Proxima Centauri, researchers speculated about the existence of another planet in the system. Astronomers used the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array of telescopes in Chile to trace light signals that appeared to be coming from that direction.
  • The radial velocity method is based on gravity and the Doppler effect, in which light increases or decreases in frequency as a source and observed objects move toward or away from each other.
mmckenziejr01

Forer effect - The Skeptic's Dictionary - Skepdic.com - 0 views

skepdic.com/forer.html

Forer effect confirmation bias cognitive biases

shared by mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17 - Cached
  • orer eff
  • The Forer effect refers to the tendency of people to rate sets of statements as highly accurate for them personally even though the statements could apply to many people.
  • Forer gave a personality test to his students, ignored their answers, and gave each student the above evaluation. He asked them to evaluate the evaluation from 0 to 5, with "5" meaning the recipient felt the evaluation was an "excellent" assessment and "4" meaning the assessment was "good." The class average evaluation was 4.26. That was in 1948. The test has been repeated hundreds of time with psychology students and the average is still around 4.2 out of 5, or 84% accurate.
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  • In short, Forer convinced people he could successfully read their character.
  • his personality analysis was taken from a newsstand astrology column and was presented to people without regard to their sun sign.
  • People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the empirical accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard.
  • The Forer effect, however, only partially explains why so many people accept as accurate occult and pseudoscientific character assessment procedures
  • Favorable assessments are "more readily accepted as accurate descriptions of subjects' personalities than unfavorable" ones. But unfavorable claims are "more readily accepted when delivered by people with high perceived status than low perceived status."
  • mmckenziejr01 on 31 Oct 17
     
    From the reading, the Forer effect seemed to be a good example of a couple cognitive biases together. The experiment and some of the findings are very interesting.
manhefnawi

10 Surprising Ways Senses Shape Perception | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...g-ways-senses-shape-perception

Sense Perception

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  • CERTAIN SOUNDS TAKE PRIORITY
  • PAST IMAGES AFFECT PRESENT PERCEPTION
  • COLOR INFLUENCES TASTE
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  • AND SO DOES SOUND
  • The phenomenon that allows us to tune out big details like this is called selective attention. If you devote all your mental energy to one task, your brain puts up blinders that block out irrelevant information without you realizing it.
  • The most mind-bending room in the "Our Senses" exhibit is practically empty. The illusion comes from the black grid pattern painted onto the white wall in such a way that straight planes appear to curve.
  • This conflicting sensory information can make us feel dizzy and even nauseous.
  • If our brains didn’t know how to adjust for lighting, we’d see every shadow as part of the object it falls on. But we can recognize that the half of a street that’s covered in shade isn’t actually darker in color than the half that sits in the sun.
  • The human brain is really good at recognizing human faces—so good it can make us see things that aren’t there. This is apparent in the Einstein hollow head illusion.
johnsonel7

Sociology and Population Change: How Demographics Affect Society | The Cornell Daily Sun - 0 views

cornellsun.com/...ow-demographics-affect-society

economics education sociology

shared by johnsonel7 on 06 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • With 360,000 new babies born each day, untangling the globe’s vast web of people can seem, at first glance, a near-impossible task.
  • “We are all products of our social circumstances,” Eloundou-Enyegue explained. “Where you were born, where you grew up, the neighborhood in which you went to school and returned home to everyday affects who you become in terms of the values, the opportunities [and belief system] that you have.”
  • “[If] a low income kid and a middle class or upper class kid … both come to Cornell, [the upper class kid] is going to be more comfortable going to a professor and contesting a grade or asking for extra help, whereas the other is maybe a little more shy, and won’t make the same claims,” Eloundou-Enyegue said
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