A collection of quotes from what I have read.
The order is based entirely on what I've been reading recently (descending order)
This lacks my older collection of quotes which were stored in a different format. So they require extra work to be added.
You probably think this looks ugly, but this is my project and I can style it how I see fit. Best viewed with Victor Mono font installed.
Yeah Matt Damon saying "fortune favours the bold"...
Yeah Matt Damon saying "fortune favours the bold" certainly didn't favour SBF's victims.
Source: reddit r/perth
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/perth/comments/zlcc45/gamblers_anonymous_warns_of_really_really_sad/j053yug/
I felt overwhelmed by stimuli from within: thoughts....
If autism is a sensory processing disorder, maybe adhd is just autism specifically for thoughts?
I felt overwhelmed by stimuli from within: thoughts. Thoughts that raced around my head like Formula 1 cars, lap after lap. Usually something like this happens the day after a busy workday with lots of communication. I’m tired, I’d love to just go to sleep, but at the same time my head just keeps racing. There’s a schedule with a thousand things to be done and I’m way too hyper to go to sleep. But I’m tired. But I have things to do. But I’m tired.
Source: But You Dont Look Autistic
But why the obsessions? And why these specific...
But why the obsessions? And why these specific subjects? Experts think predictability is a factor. Most autistic people’s hobbies can be categorised or are logical or predictable. Horses or birds belong to animal species and have certain characteristics. Computers do what you tell them to do. (And if they don’t, that’s usually because you – or the software developer – made a mistake. A computer can’t just go and decide to do something wrong because it doesn’t like you, no matter how many people say it can.) Stamps can go into an album, bicycle race results can be compared. And sorting, categorising and calculating simply makes most autistics very happy.
Source: But You Dont Look Autistic
That doesn’t just explain autistic people’s hypersensitivity, but...
That doesn’t just explain autistic people’s hypersensitivity, but also their apparent insensitivity and limitations in social communication. We close up in the overwhelming storm of stimuli, like a computer that freezes when you give it ten different tasks at the same time.
Source: But You Dont Look Autistic
A more inclusive, more comprehensive explanation can be...
A more inclusive, more comprehensive explanation can be found in the Intense World Theory, a theory that has been gaining more credence in the past few years. The founders of this theory, neuroscientists Henry and Kamila Markram, have an autistic son. Their findings resonate with what a lot of autistic people actually already know: the autistic brain is hyperactive. According to the Markrams, more connections are being made in the autistic brain and brain cells respond more emphatically to each other. There’s a stronger response to stimuli, thoughts run rampant quicker. In short: the world is extremely intense for autistics.
Source: But You Dont Look Autistic
And in my head I go around and...
And in my head I go around and around about whether my fellow Nadirites suffer the same steep self-disgust. From a height, watching them, I usually imagine that the other passengers are to the impassively contemptuous gaze of the local merchants, service people, photo-op-with-lizard vendors, etc. I usually imagine that my fellow tourists are too bovinely self-absorbed to even notice how we’re looked at. At other times, though, it occurs to me that the other Americans on board quite possibly feel the same vague discomfort about their bovine role in port that I do, but that they refuse to let their boviscopophobia rule them: they’ve paid good money to have fun be pampered and record some foreign experiences, and they’ll be goddamned if they’re going to let some self-indulgent of neurotic projection about how their Americanness appears to malnourished locals detract from the 7NC Luxury Cruise worked and saved for and decided they deserve.
Source: A supposedly fun thing i will never do again
Where Asperger saw threads of genius and disability...
Where Asperger saw threads of genius and disability inextricably intertwined in his patients’ family histories—testifying to the complex genetic roots of their condition and the “social value of this personality type,” as he put it—Kanner saw the shadow of the sinister figure that would become infamous in popular culture as the “refrigerator mother.” He was an astute clinical observer and a persuasive writer, but in this case his errors in interpreting his patients’ behavior had wide-reaching implications. By blaming parents for inadvertently causing their children’s autism, Kanner made his syndrome a source of shame and stigma for families worldwide while sending autism research off in the wrong direction for decades.
Source: Neurotribes
It was as if the children were constantly...
It was as if the children were constantly generating rules about how things should be based on how they were when they happened to come across them. A walk taken along a certain route one day had to be taken the same way every time after that. A random sequence of actions—such as the flushing of a toilet and the switching off of lights before bedtime—instantly became a ritual that had to be endlessly reiterated. The most humble and ordinary day-to-day events became imbued with terrifying significance.
Source: Neurotribes
Karl Bonhoeffer, a pioneering neurologist. Bonhoeffer parted ways...
Karl Bonhoeffer, a pioneering neurologist. Bonhoeffer parted ways with the father of diagnostic psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin, by pointing out the deceptively seductive power of naming a condition. The problem with labels, he said, is that they seem to correspond to disease entities that live independently of the patient, like types of viruses or bacteria. But in psychiatry, labels describe constellations of behavior that can be related to any number of underlying conditions.
Source: Neurotribes
Mindful of the poet Horace’s advice that profound...
Mindful of the poet Horace’s advice that profound truths are often best disguised as jokes (“Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat?” or “What prevents a laughing man from telling the truth?”),
Source: Neurotribes
There, he earned his final footnote in history...
There, he earned his final footnote in history by befriending a fellow POW who later became a patient of Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist-author of Man’s Search for Meaning, a memoir of surviving three years in Auschwitz, Theresienstadt, and Dachau. In a section of the book about redemption, Frankl wrote: Let me cite the case of Dr. J. He was the only man I ever encountered in my whole life whom I would dare call a Mephistophelean being, a satanic figure. At that time he was generally called “the mass murderer of Steinhof ” (the large mental hospital in Vienna). When the Nazis started their euthanasia program, he held all the strings in his hands and was so fanatic in the job assigned to him that he tried not to let one single psychotic individual escape the gas chamber . . . Recently, however, I was consulted by a former Austrian diplomat who had been imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain for many years, first in Siberia and then in the famous Lubianka prison in Moscow. While I was examining him neurologically, he suddenly asked me whether I happened to know Dr. J. After my affirmative reply he continued: “I made his acquaintance in Lubianka. There he died, at about the age of forty, from cancer of the urinary bladder. Before he died, however, he showed himself to be the best comrade you can imagine! He gave consolation to everybody . . . He was the best friend I met during my long years in prison!” This is the story of Dr. J, the “mass murderer of Steinhof.” How can we dare predict the behavior of man?
Source: Neurotribes
I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome...
I’m pretty sure I know what this syndrome is and how it’s related to the brochure’s seductive promise of total self-indulgence. What’s in play here, I think, is the subtle universal shame that accompanies self-indulgence, the need to explain to just about anybody why the self-indulgence isn’t in fact really self-indulgence. Like: I never go get a massage just to get a massage, I go because this old sports-related back injury’s killing me and more or less forcing me to get a massage; or like: I never just “want” a cigarette, I always “need” a cigarette.
This is the occasion I first see the thirteen-year-old kid with the toupee. He’s slumped pre-adolescently in his chair with his feet up on some kind of rattan hamper while what I’ll bet is his mom talks at him nonstop; he is staring into whatever special distance people in areas of mass public stasis stare into.
Source: A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again
In 1971, before these problems emerged, Taronga Zoo...
In 1971, before these problems emerged, Taronga Zoo obtained fourteen Healesville ibises to create its own wild flock. When the first wild-born chick was fledged in 1973 the zoo felt triumphant, issuing a self-congratulatory press release. ‘This successful hatching is regarded as a triumph for Taronga Zoo Bird keeping Staff: it is probably the only ibis hatched in Sydney environs for many, many years, and it confirms the success of an experiment to create a liberty flock.’ This ‘liberty flock’ roamed around Mosman each day after breakfasting with the flamingoes. ‘The experiment works wonderfully’, the press release crowed. But over the years the ibises multiplied and spread across Sydney. Now there are ibises patrolling parks and slinking down back alleys in Kings Cross. They raid bins and scare children. At a breeding colony in the Botany wetland rare Japanese snipe were displaced. Ronald Strahan, former zoo director, openly admits his zoo spawned Sydney’s ibis problem. ‘I can’t prove it, but I do have it on my conscience,’ he told me. The zoo-keeper (now retired) who freed the flock is also convinced.
Source: The new nature
"Study the chapter opener to help you get...
"Study the chapter opener to help you get ready to read." "Oh, no," groan students. "Nothing good will come of this." They know that no one has to tell them how to get ready to read a Harry Potter book or any other book that is readable.
Source: Lies my teacher told me
The masterminds of our war in Vietnam, Lyndon...
The masterminds of our war in Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, tried to manipulate the media, which usually worked, notoriously about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when they got newspapers to report on enemy ship movements that didn't exist. That manipulation undermined the public's confidence in the media after the truth came out. Johnson and Nixon also tried to suppress the media, also usually successfully, which again undermined the media after the truth came out. When that did not work, both, along with Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew, attacked the media as biased, wrong, and anti-American.
Source: Lies my teacher told me
For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious...
For 360 minutes per diem, we receive unconscious reinforcement of the deep thesis that the most significant quality of truly alive persons is watchableness, and that genuine human worth is not just identical with but rooted in the phenomenon of watching.
Source: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, David foster Wallace
Tasmania’s south-west, the great wilderness mecca, is by...
Tasmania’s south-west, the great wilderness mecca, is by some criteria a biodiversity desert. Diversity of mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs, fish and plants is low. More reptile species (twelve) roam through my backyard than occupy south-west Tasmania, and my local creek, thick with weeds, supports many more kinds of rainforest tree, including an endangered myrtle.
Source: The new nature
Explorer Dirk Hartog summed matters up in 1616....
Explorer Dirk Hartog summed matters up in 1616. ‘This land is cursed,’ he wrote, ‘the animals hop, not run, the birds run, not fly, and the swans are black, not white.’
Source: The new nature
We hear so much these days about wildlife...
We hear so much these days about wildlife dying out, as if nature en masse were sliding down the drain. The truth is more interesting. Many native things are thriving by riding on our coat-tails. Seagulls, ravens, magpies, red-back spiders and bulrushes have never known better times. Their futures brightened when people came to the great south land.
Source: The new nature
"Things look different without the Prophets' lies clouding...
"Things look different without the Prophets' lies clouding my vision. I would like to see our own world - to know that it is safe." - To the Arbiter, on board of the Shadow of Intent.
Source: Halo 3
“The gesture that precipitates this insight for most...
“The gesture that precipitates this insight for most people is an attempt to invert consciousness upon itself—to look for that which is looking—and to notice, in the first instant of looking for your self, what happens to the apparent divide between subject and object. Do you still feel that you are over there, behind your eyes, looking out at a world of objects?”
Source: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
I love it, because it’s so strange, so...
I love it, because it’s so strange, so dizzying, and — credit where due–because our mystery producer is truly going with the grain of the medium, in a way that no one merely “making albums” does, at all. What could be more 21st century, more “liquid modernity”, than releasing your music as a haze of variations into the swirling currents of the algorithm?
Source: https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/#spotify
Link: https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/visions/#spotify
“The Buddha’s famous parable meant to denigrate mere...
“The Buddha’s famous parable meant to denigrate mere intellectualism seems apropos here:1 A man is struck in the chest with a poison arrow. A surgeon rushes to his side to begin the work of saving his life, but the man resists these ministrations. He first wants to know the name of the fletcher who fashioned the arrow’s shaft, the genus of the wood from which it was cut, the disposition of the man who shot it, the name of the horse upon which he rode, and a thousand other things that have no bearing upon his present suffering or his ultimate survival. The man needs to get his priorities straight. His commitment to thinking about the world results from a basic misunderstanding of his predicament. And though we may be only dimly aware of it, we, too, have a problem that will not be solved by acquiring more conceptual knowledge.”
Source: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
“Take a moment to absorb how bizarre this...
“Take a moment to absorb how bizarre this possibility is. The point of view from which you are consciously reading these words may not be the only conscious point of view to be found in your brain. It is one thing to say that you are unaware of a vast amount of activity in your brain. It is quite another to say that some of this activity is aware of itself and is watching your every move.”
Source: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
“In such cases, each hemisphere might well have...
“In such cases, each hemisphere might well have its own beliefs. Consider what this says about the dogma—widely held under Christianity and Islam—that a person’s salvation depends upon her believing the right doctrine about God. If a split-brain patient’s left hemisphere accepts the divinity of Jesus, but the right doesn’t, are we to imagine that she now harbors two immortal souls, one destined for the company of angels and the other for an eternity in hellfire?”
Source: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
“Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of...
“Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences. While these states of mind are usually interpreted through the lens of one or another religious doctrine, we know that this is a mistake. Nothing that a Christian, a Muslim, and a Hindu can experience—self-transcending love, ecstasy, bliss, inner light—constitutes evidence in support of their traditional beliefs, because their beliefs are logically incompatible with one another. A deeper principle must be at work.”
Source: Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion
His speeches were once described as “an army...
His speeches were once described as “an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea.”
Source: Blink
The ADHD burnout cycle in comic form: https://twitter.com/ADHD_Alien/status/1157690943014920192
Link: https://twitter.com/ADHD_Alien/status/1157690943014920192
“Hoover even overcame his shortness. The FBI public...
“Hoover even overcame his shortness. The FBI public relations arm, Crime Records, would answer inquiries about his height with the prescribed response “The director is just a shade under six feet tall.” A raised dais under his desk, the avoidance of tall people at parties, and the rare promotion of tall agents to headquarters positions helped maintain the illusion”
Source: J. Edgar Hoover
Of late, however, the old incompatibility and compatibility...
Of late, however, the old incompatibility and compatibility hypotheses have given way to a slightly more open approach suggesting that some birds can actually like each other and are compatible for very individual reasons. As one recent study of zebra finch partnering behaviour found, coupling up pairs randomly (and without the birds’ consent and wish) had poor results.
Source: Australian Magpie
A lot of not quitting quotes are bullshit....
A lot of not quitting quotes are bullshit.
Michael Jordan quit college before he graduated.
Michael Jordan then quit basketball to play baseball.
Michael Jordan then quit baseball to play basketball again.
Michael Jordan then quit basketball to become a team owner.
Michael Jordan then returned to play basketball but quit 2 years later.
Michael Jordan then quit being married to his wife.
This guy quits stuff.
If someone told Michael Jordan that he shouldn't quit college a year early to play in the NBA, you'd say that person is an idiot. Quitting things is a good idea when you're not happy or have a better opportunity or any million other reasons that people have for quitting things.
If you have found a singular dream that you want to pursue, fine, don't quit things that are in service of that singular dream. But a lot of other things in life are much messier than singular dreams. It's no surprise that the list of quotes come from two athletes, two generals, one positive-thinking self-help guru whose ideas were rejected by mental health professionals, and one from a novel which, in context, I'm not really sure proves any good points about not quitting.
I stayed in a job for 2 years that I knew I should have quit after 3 months. I got nothing for staying an additional 21 months of my life except for a few friends.
As counterpoint:
“Think about all the time, brainpower, and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting”
― Steven D. Levitt
“Quitting is not giving up, it's choosing to focus your attention on something more important. Quitting is not losing confidence, it's realizing that there are more valuable ways you can spend your time. Quitting is not making excuses, it's learning to be more productive, efficient and effective instead. Quitting is letting go of things (or people) that are sucking the life out of you so you can do more things that will bring you strength.”
― Osayi Emokpae Lasisi
Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GetMotivated/comments/5m7a3p/image_xkcd_shouldve_left_sooner/dc1qpwj/
The unfortunate similarity between signs of ADHD and...
The unfortunate similarity between signs of ADHD and normal misbehavior is frustrating for everyone involved. ADHD’s effects operate on the foggy boundaries between voluntary and involuntary, possible and impossible, victim and perpetrator. It’s not clear where unwillingness stops and inability starts.
Source: https://www.raptitude.com/2021/03/what-raptitude-has-always-been-about/
“Bell Labs was slow to abandon the vocoder...
“Bell Labs was slow to abandon the vocoder concept. As late as 1961, Betty Shannon’s former boss, John Pierce, half seriously proposed to extend the vocoder concept to television or videophones. “Imagine that we had at the receiver a sort of rubbery model of the human face,” Pierce wrote. The basic idea was that every American home would have an electronic puppet head. When a call came in, the puppet head would morph to the appearance of a distant speaker, and you’d converse with it, as the puppet head mimicked every word and facial expression of the calling party.”
Source: Fortune’s Formula
There was the utterly unlikely story of four...
There was the utterly unlikely story of four male magpies from different clutches that I had hand-raised together and who stayed together for life, after 10 years accepting one female into their group who then produced two offspring per year every year that were then raised jointly by all four males while the territory was extremely well defended against many incursions and birds of prey.
Source: Australian Magpie
A pair that was in the middle of...
A pair that was in the middle of raising two fledged youngsters, the male suddenly disappeared and the female was struggling on her own to provide food for the two fledged offspring. Very unexpectedly, the male that had disappeared flew in a week or so later with two females in tow and immediately began to assume authority over the territory and these two new females. The female parent was initially confined to a small area in the territory with her two fledged offspring but such a semi-truce only lasted for a few days. After continual harassment the female and her two offspring were forced to leave altogether, facing a very uncertain future, almost certainly condemning the fledglings to death.
Source: Australian Magpie
I just had the thought that someone, somewhere...
I just had the thought that someone, somewhere at this moment is risking their life just noodling their body through small water-filled crevices underneath the surface of the earth. And here I am, sitting on my couch, safe and sound. I am the winner here.
Source: Shadynasty26 on reddit
Another feeding innovation by magpies has recently been...
Another feeding innovation by magpies has recently been discovered by Colin and Suzie Fairclough from Noggerup, south of Perth, Western Australia, that so far, I believe, has not been described in the literature. They noticed that magpies were searching in the bushes of native fuchsias, not at ground but at magpie eye level. The fuchsias produce beautiful long and tubular bells in bright red. They obviously also produce nectar because these flowers are regularly frequented by introduced honey bees. The bells are so long that the bee has to crawl completely inside the flower and only a little of its abdomen remains visible. In that position, they are quite vulnerable and incapable of responding to a predator by flight. The magpies have learned to wait until the bee is completely enveloped by the flower and then catch it by the abdomen, slowly move it to the ground where they wipe off the sting and then consume it
Source: Australian Magpie
He’s a difficult man to describe, as he...
He’s a difficult man to describe, as he seems to have been solely engineered to be both well-meaning and devoid of any interesting traits.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
Tamara had brought Albert into the office a...
Tamara had brought Albert into the office a couple times for some reason and you had taken a liking to what would prove to be the only living thing you’ve never had any interest in eating. You remember Tamara holding his tiny tortoise form in her hands, his legs pointlessly flailing in the air, his eyes calmly staring straight ahead. You watched him eat a cube of watermelon and experience pure bliss. A tiny, simple thing deemed deserving of centenarian status, or so he’d thought. You remember being jealous of the incredible confidence he seemed to radiate from behind the protection of his longevity and a home he carried with him wherever he went. You’d never seen peace before you’d met Albert. And you’d never known such jealousy.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
DESPITE YOUR BEST EFFORTS, you find yourself in...
DESPITE YOUR BEST EFFORTS, you find yourself in the office parking garage with Gary and his two sales department subordinates, Brett and Brent. These two men are so alike in their incredible subservience to Gary that you genuinely thought that they were the same person until just now when you saw them together.
The restaurant is a temple to the concepts of meat and yelling.
Gary laughs, taking his frequent patronage at a chain restaurant and mistaking it for friendship.
Brett and Brent laugh, perfect servants in every way; though Brent’s laugh seems strained and his eyes get a bit distant. It’s as though he wonders for a moment exactly which decision brought him here to WING TOWN, where he lay prostrate to the conversational whims of a man with so little self-awareness that he thinks his waitress is interested in him romantically.
Though when it comes to human dating, it...
Though when it comes to human dating, it would seem that knowing that someone likes dogs is like knowing less than nothing about them.
You know all the things that humans should talk about on dates (hiking, study abroad trips they went on almost a decade ago, and the concept of dogs)
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
You’re pretty sure that human dates require dim...
You’re pretty sure that human dates require dim lighting and slightly fancier than normal attire to create confusion and add pressure to meeting a complete stranger with whom you may spend the rest of your life.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
The restaurant’s dim lighting immediately signals it as...
The restaurant’s dim lighting immediately signals it as both a place of importance and a place where you can make use of your naturally impressive low-light vision. The entire restaurant looks like it was designed to look like a human’s version of the woods. Nearly every surface is wooden and made to look rougher than it is. Each table is a large slab of wood. The bar is an even larger slab of wood on top of a different type of wood. The lights look dated and bad, which is how you know they are nice. The floor is covered in some sort of ornate but messed-up tile.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
It didn’t really sound like the insects were...
It didn’t really sound like the insects were kidding around but luckily, months of experience in Corporate America have trained you in the art of learning to work with someone who is actively gaslighting you.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
The office is open and bright, lit only...
The office is open and bright, lit only by fluorescent bulbs that look so unlike sunlight that you assume that it must mean they’re better somehow. The common space has a wide variety of amenities such as couches, soda machines, and a pool table that you’ve never seen anyone use but just knowing that the option is out there fills you with excitement. As it turns out, capitalism can make room for fun.
Source: I AM NOT A WOLF
“The traditional medical model emphasizes pathology—what is wrong...
“The traditional medical model emphasizes pathology—what is wrong and sick and in need of remediation. However, when applied to the mind, this approach can do a good deal of damage. The kidney doesn’t care if you call it sick, but the mind does. If you tell a person that she has a mental disorder, you create a mental disorder—not only in the patient but in those who love her as well. The disorder is fear. Chronic fear holds more people back in life than any other mental infirmity. How ironic—and wrong—that the helping professions all too often create this problem.”
Source: Delivered from Distraction
In lieu of a proper political or religious...
In lieu of a proper political or religious creed, the Pancasila, Sukarno’s set of bland ‘national principles’, was firmly established as Indonesia’s national ideology. Pancasila’s five vague requirements—belief in a non-specific god, nationalism, humanitarianism, social justice and democracy—were hardly demanding for the average Indonesian. But their very blandness meant that virtually any opinion could be deemed anti-Pancasila if needs be. Every single organisation in the country, from sports clubs to political parties and religious groups, was obliged to make Pancasila its sole ‘guiding principle’.
Source: Brief history of indonesia, Tim Hanningan
Embittered former colonial employees pontificating about the wrongdoings...
Embittered former colonial employees pontificating about the wrongdoings of the empire for which they had once toiled were something of a nineteenth-century cliché, and there were plenty of other Dutch and Englishmen doing the same thing. The more energetic of their number might write a letter to a newspaper, or even publish a pamphlet.
Source: Brief history of indonesia, Tim Hanningan
“I HOPE THIS E-MAIL DOES NOT FIND YOU...
Same author as I AM NOT A WOLF
“I HOPE THIS E-MAIL DOES NOT FIND YOU
I HOPE YOUR CHAIR HAS GROWN OVER WITH MOSS
I HOPE A PLEASANT BUT UNOBSERVED BEAM OF LIGHT HITS YOUR DESK PERFECTLY THROUGH THE COLLAPSED CEILING
I HOPE THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING”
Link: https://mobile.twitter.com/SICKOFWOLVES/status/1356294995246940160
“In captured areas of Poland and the Soviet...
“In captured areas of Poland and the Soviet Union, parallel organizations like the party’s agency that seized land for redistribution to German peasants (the Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt) had more freedom than in the Reich. The SS set up its own military-economic empire there where the normative state played hardly any role at all.55 In that no-man’s-land, both bureaucratic regularity and moral principles were easily set aside, and the needs of the master race became the only criteria for action. The traditional contempt of German nationalists for Slavic Untermenschen aggravated the permissive climate. In that nameless nonstate, Nazi zealots had free rein to fulfill their wildest fantasies of racial purification without interference from a distant normative state.”
Source: The Anatomy of Fascism
“Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a...
“Fascist radicalization, finally, cannot be understood as a rational way to persuade a people to give their all to a war effort. It led Nazi Germany into a runaway spiral that ultimately prevented rational war making, as vital resources were diverted from military operations to the murder of the Jews. Finally radicalization denies even the nation that is supposed to be at fascism’s heart. At the end, fanatical fascists prefer to destroy everything in a final paroxysm, even their own country, rather than admit defeat”
Source: The Anatomy of Fascism
The black-and- white subspecies of the White-winged Fairy-...
The black-and- white subspecies of the White-winged Fairy- wren on Barrow and Dirk Hartog Islands (free of cats since 2016), are under no real threat of extinction, especially as the Dirk Hartog subspecies has now been successfully reintroduced to the Montebello Islands— from which they were extirpated by nuclear bombs in the 1950s.
Source: Bird life magazine dec 2021
Reports of Aboriginal hunting techniques in the nineteenth...
Reports of Aboriginal hunting techniques in the nineteenth century show that great skill was required–ducks were snatched by an under water hunter breathing through hollow reeds; other birds were tricked by nooses lowered over their necks from a place of concealment, or hit with clubs and boomerangs, or spooked into nets strung between trees by a slab of bark winging past like a hawk. Perches smeared with sticky fig sap ensnared small birds, as did tangles of sticky herbs draped around pools. Crows and hawks were grabbed by a hunter stretched upon a rock in the sun, counterfeiting sleep, with a piece of fish or meat in the hand as bait. Emus were drugged at pools laced with narcotics, or lured towards spears by a fairy-wren fluttering on a string. How was the wren caught? James Dawson offered one explanation in 1881: ‘Small birds are killed with a long, sharp-pointed wand by boys, who lie in thickets and attract them by imitating their cries. When a bird alights on a bush above their heads, they gently push up the wand and suddenly transfix the animal.’
Source: Where Song Began
In Australia, mild temperatures and evergreen leaves ensure...
In Australia, mild temperatures and evergreen leaves ensure there are more winter insects and little winter fruit, except in all the gardens planted with northern privets, cotoneaster, camphor laurel, firethorn, hawthorn and holly. These fruits are enhancing the winter survival of pied currawongs, which have become the main predators of small birds in eastern cities and towns. Nest predation is increasing, and a connection has been made to proliferating currawongs and all the fleshy fruits of exotic shrubs and trees. Satin bowerbirds are entering gardens in Canberra because these fruits suit them better than the leaves they turn to in winter. The plants are responding by spreading into paddocks and bushland, becoming weeds wherever birds drop their seeds.
Source: Where Song Began
When fires are stopped, trees often thicken up...
When fires are stopped, trees often thicken up and suppress grass. In national parks along the east coast, missing out on Indigenous burning and on lightning fires that don’t travel far because roads and farms serve as firebreaks, rainforests are advancing via seeds dropped under eucalypts by birds. Australia would carry far more rainforest (supporting rainforest birds) had grasses never evolved. The area of forest on earth would double were fire switched off, according to modelling by leading biologists, with Africa and South America gaining the most.
Source: Where song began
a defining article about Australia’s flora penned by...
a defining article about Australia’s flora penned by Nancy Burbidge in 1960. The tropics she depicted as ‘rich in Malaysian elements’ while also harbouring old Australian endemics. North Queensland had been the main portal for entry and exit of plants, in traffic that was uneven: ‘Northward migration of Australian elements has apparently been less successful than southward migration of Malaysian elements.’8 Her paper and others like it drew fire in the years that followed, as surging nationalism inspired scientists to reclaim the rainforests for Australia. One concern was that paranoia about the Yellow Peril pouring in from the north would undermine efforts to protect Queensland’s forests.
Source: Where Song Began
One reason origins are difficult to think about...
One reason origins are difficult to think about is that we’re so apt to see the past through our own backgrounds. There is ‘the vanity of the present’, to quote Richard Dawkins–the presumption that the past had a purpose, which was to deliver this particular present. Fossil experts discuss ‘experiments in evolution’, as if birds had an adolescent phase during which they tried out jaws of teeth before settling on the design they have today.
Source: Where Song Began
Australia was colonised at a time when interest...
Australia was colonised at a time when interest in exudates ran high. The proof is preserved in the name of the dominant trees: ‘gum trees’. Their sticky secretions served well against dysentery, becoming one of Australia’s first exports, sold in London as ‘Botany Bay Kino’. By sniffing and licking anything that oozed from trees, colonial botanists found that Australia abounded in interesting exudates. There was talk of making rubber from gum tree sap and explosives from grasstree resin. Wattle gum was sold in Sydney stores as chewing gum, although in texture it is more like boiled toffee. The banyalla tree excited interest for having rancid-tasting resin that triggered nausea and headaches.
Source: Where Song Began
Whatever inspiration can come from confronting one's own...
Whatever inspiration can come from confronting one's own mortality, I'm all for it, but keep in mind, if you're not on your deathbed, you probably have rent due next month.
“Programmers are experts at setting up convoluted menu-systems,...
“Programmers are experts at setting up convoluted menu-systems, learn to work around it, and then don't understand why anyone has a problem with it.”
That's the problem with vaccines. When they work,...
That's the problem with vaccines. When they work, absolutely nothing happens. Nothing. Parents go on with their lives, not once thinking that their child was saved from meningitis caused by Hib or from liver cancer caused by Hepatitis B or from fatal pneumonia caused by pneumococcus or from paralysis caused by polio. We live in a state of blissful denial. But somebody was getting those diseases. Before pharmaceutical companies made the Hib vaccine in the early 1990s, every year about ten thousand children were stricken with meningitis, leaving many blind, deaf, and retarded. Today, fewer than fifty children every year suffer this disease. But who are those thousands of children who aren't getting Hib today? What are their names? We don't know. And that's what makes vaccines - or any prevention - much less compelling than treatment. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bone marrow transplants and lung transplants and kidney transplants and heart transplants. These therapies are extraordinarily expensive, and they certainly don't save money for the health care system or society. But when we know a person is sick, we'll stop at nothing to help. Unfortunately, we seem perfectly willing to withhold life-saving vaccines when we don't know who is going to be sick. We're willing to take that gamble - a gamble that many children will inevitably lose.
Source: Vaccinated
It seems that Pasteur wanted to turn his...
It seems that Pasteur wanted to turn his nephew’s thesis into a condemnation of the way that he, Pasteur, had been treated by the Rabbit Commission, the New South Wales Government, and others. The lengthy introduction to the chicken-cholera section rings with language that is typical of the by-now embittered and quite unwell Louis Pasteur, and very untypical of the polite, ultra-diplomatic Adrien Loir. It is clear that Pasteur dictated this part of the thesis to Loir.
Source: Pasteur’s Gambit
When people start anxiously or glibly opining about...
When people start anxiously or glibly opining about gene editing for designer babies or selecting embryos for blue-eyed children, they’re not really talking about our contemporary understanding of genetics. Instead, they are relying on a hugely outdated or a never-true version of altering heredity that is pretty much impossible. If you were to select an embryo for eye or hair colour based on the versions of the genes most closely associated with blue eyes or red hair, you’d have an expensive gamble, and a hard-to-calculate chance of getting what you want. Our current understanding of genetics does not allow for control of even the supposedly simplest traits.
Source: Control Adam Rutherford
We now know that nature and nurture were...
We now know that nature and nurture were never in competition. When it comes to the complexities of human behaviour, for several decades most geneticists and psychologists have adhered to what has been described as the first rule of behavioural genetics: ‘everything is heritable’. All behaviours have a genetic component to them, and an environmental one too. What we really want to know is how much of each, and how each influences the other
Source: Control Adam Rutherford
In November 2021, Imperial College London proposed removing...
In November 2021, Imperial College London proposed removing a bust and the name of the nineteenth-century evolutionary scientist and vocal abolitionist Thomas Huxley from their campus, on account of his views on racial hierarchies (a view very widely held at the time), while apparently not considering that the whole university is named after the empire that oversaw slavery. Kellogg remains a global brand apparently untainted by its weird sex-obsessed racist eugenicist founder, just as many of us drive Ford cars despite the proud antisemitism of Henry Ford, who is namechecked in Mein Kampf as a role model to its author.
Source: Control Adam Rutherford
Some frequently used datasets that purport to represent...
Some frequently used datasets that purport to represent national IQs – including for many sub-Saharan African countries having significantly lower averages than European countries – are meaningless, absurd and deliberately biased, as selected by notable racist scientist Richard Lynn. For example, the national IQ for Botswana in the NIQ_QNWSAS dataset is 69.5, but upon inspection, this number was arrived at with a single sample of 104 natively Tswana-speaking high school students aged seventeen to twenty, tested in English, and thus incomparable with that of other countries. For Somalia (measured at IQ 67.7): a single sample of refugees aged eight to eighteen tested in a Kenyan refugee camp, and so on. Nevertheless, these data are unquestioningly cited frequently as valid by dozens if not hundreds of peer-reviewed academic papers, despite being demonstrably invalid, flawed and perhaps fraudulent.
Source: Control by Adam Rutherford
I’m not in the business of erasing or...
I’m not in the business of erasing or ignoring knowledge because of its provenance. We rightly celebrate the pleasing Newtonian principle that we see further by standing on the shoulders of giants. We are not nearly as good at recognising that our vantage point can be unstable because those giants may also have been bastards. This is how history works. It is not there to reassure us or make us feel warm. If the actions of our forebears only make you feel proud, and don’t sometimes baffle, upset or anger you, then you may not be doing history at all. The oft-heard refrains ‘you can’t change history!’ and ‘you are erasing the past!’ have become standard canards deployed in response to reassessments of historical figures. Both sentiments are obtusely incorrect. To blindly commemorate people with significant legacies is itself the erasure of history, as those tributes offer no context or analysis of their work. They merely assert monolithic greatness. Posthumous celebration of individuals is inherently a political act, and their subsequent removal from the public sphere does not erase the past – on the contrary, it constitutes history. The past is fixed, but history is always changing, and is always contested.
Source: Control Adam Rutherford
However, all science is political. This is a...
However, all science is political. This is a statement that causes vexation among some who confuse the ideals of science with its reality. We aim for an objective description of the world, and try to minimise the grubby political, personal and psychological biases that hinder our view of reality. But in all science – and especially the scientific study of humans – we inherit knowledge infected by the contingencies and political obsessions of our scientific forebears, whether we know it, deny it or acknowledge it.
Source: Control Adam Rutherford
TED of course can’t be held solely responsible...
TED of course can’t be held solely responsible for the increasingly eschatological pronouncements of this cohort [the tech elite]. That would be, in a way, to buy into its hype too much. But as the most visible and influential public speaking platform of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, it has been deeply implicated in broadcasting and championing the Silicon Valley version of the future. TED is probably best understood as the propaganda arm of an ascendant technocracy. It helped refine prediction into a rhetorical art well-suited to these aspiring world conquerors — even the ones who fail.
Point by detailed point, Pasteur aggressively countered Koch’s...
Point by detailed point, Pasteur aggressively countered Koch’s claims and counter-claims. And it was obvious now why the German had waited three months to answer him. To attack vaccination, and Pasteur’s use of vaccination, Koch had collected recent statistics on the stock vaccinated in France with Pasteur’s anthrax vaccine. He then used these statistics ‘in a most erroneous manner’ according to Pasteur, skewing and misrepresenting some figures and omitting others to condemn vaccination. ‘Entirely violent as your attacks are, Monsieur, they will not impede its success,’ Pasteur declared. ‘I must add, in conclusion, that everything predicts that preventative vaccination will be even more effective in the future.’ ...
From that point on, the scientific, medical and veterinary communities became divided into two camps – those for vaccination, and therefore for Pasteur; and the anti-vaccinists who joined Koch in deriding and opposing vaccination. The divide became so marked that those who supported Pasteur used his word, microbiology, to describe his field of science while Koch and his supporters spoke of the very same field as bacteriology.
Pasteur's Gambit
Source: Pasteur's Gambit
I hate how much phones lately alters the...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739235#29742341
I hate how much phones lately alters the images. Of course it most of the time makes the images look better, and cameras are a big selling point on a phone.
But I don't like how my photos of people suddenly have a filter applied to the faces, how a picture of leaves during fall have vibrance exaggerated, how the sky looks clearer than it really did.
Naturally, blackbirding put Europeans living in the islands...
Naturally, blackbirding put Europeans living in the islands in danger. Anglican Bishop Paterson of Vanuatu knew his life was in constant danger from natives because blackbirding ships often impersonated missionary ships. In October 1871 when he landed alone on the island of Nukapuj, he was clubbed to death by the inhabitants, and two of his companions waiting offshore in a boat were killed with poisoned arrows.
Source: Australians vol ii
The high standing of the bushranger in popular...
The high standing of the bushranger in popular imagination has been, despite the disapproval of authorities, enduring. Ned Kelly remains fabled, where the man who condemned him to death, Redmond Barry, despite being a great Victorian in both senses of the word, despite his statue outside the State Library of Victoria, despite being one of the creators and Chancellor of Melbourne University, despite his brilliance as judge and classicist, despite his being bravely loyal to a long-term partner named Mrs Barrow, despite his being a defender of Aborigines, is unknown in popular legend.
Even the students who pass Redmond Barry Hall at Melbourne University are probably ignorant of his record. Search the streets of the cities and one finds statues of forgotten monarchs and unspecified colonial politicians, and scarcely a marker to bushrangers. Glenrowan, scene of the last stand of the Kelly Gang, goes unmarked and unexplained by anyone other than local entrepreneurs. Yet the bushrangers’ monuments have existed since their day and until now in the Australian imagination.
Source: Australians vol ii
It was phrenology which made Truganini, the Tasmanian...
It was phrenology which made Truganini, the Tasmanian Aborigine, very nervous of what would happen to her body after her death. William Lanney, her husband, seen as the last surviving full-blood Tasmanian Aborigine, had died in 1869 and his corpse had been immediately dismembered and beheaded. ‘I know that when I die the Museum wants my body,’ Truganini told a clergyman. She had good reason to be fearful that her head would join the hundreds on display for the use of scholars in museums in Australia and throughout the world. Indeed, after her death in 1876, the Dandridge family, who had protected her in life, buried her at midnight in the remains of the old Female Factory at the Cascades. It was scientific men from the Royal Society of Tasmania, not ghouls, who exhumed her body in December 1878 and kept it in a secure part of the museum for study by scientists. But ultimately, in the early twentieth century, as she had feared, she was placed on public display. She would again be buried—with honours and more publicly than the first time—a hundred years after her death.
Source: Australians vol ii
The cause of the death of Governor-General Coen...
The cause of the death of Governor-General Coen was never finally established. It is only known that he died in late 1629 at the age of 42, likely from typhus contracted during the second uprising from all the corpses rotting in the river that ran through the middle of Batavia, or perhaps dysentery or cholera – maybe even an excess of bile? Another theory, however, floated by Charles Corn in his outstanding book The Scents of Eden, has it that ‘another less plausible source suggests that Coen died of sheer terror over the impending confrontation with his successor, Governor-General Specx’. Specx happened to be the father of a young girl whom Coen had had flogged for making love to a 15-year-old soldier, whom he had subsequently executed. Corn suggests that perhaps he was poisoned, though concurs with most that the cause of death was more than likely fatal illness. Whatever it was, for a man who had been the cause of the deaths of so many, he was singularly fortunate to die in his bed and not at the point of a sword or an arrow.
Source: Batavia
Cancel culture new? Tell that to Socrates
Cancel culture new? Tell that to Socrates
Source: Mekisteus on Reddit
Did former Vandemonian and New South Wales convicts...
Did former Vandemonian and New South Wales convicts settle in South Australia? It would be remarkable if they did not, thus rendering the colony less pure than it chose to think itself. The South Australian Act of 1838 excluded them, and Adelaide’s first execution, in 1839, was of an escaped Irish convict from New South Wales named Michael Magee. Other convicts and ticket-of-leave men came as members of droving parties, and some settled in shacks in the Adelaide Hills and were referred to as Tiersmen, fearless, lawless Irish who lived on the tiers of the hills above the Anglican plain of Adelaide. One of these men, Tolmer, was hanged for bushranging and outraged decent citizens by smoking his pipe on the scaffold. Other ex-convicts worked for the South Australian Company itself at its Encounter Bay whaling station, again as early as 1839. That some of them did not marry or beget young South Australians is improbable.
Source: Australians vol ii
“The four kinds of malaria to which these...
“The four kinds of malaria to which these statements applied are caused by protists of the species Plasmodium vivax, Plasmodium falciparum, Plasmodium ovale, and Plasmodium malariae, all of them belonging to the same diverse genus, Plasmodium, which encompasses about two hundred species. Most of the others infect birds, reptiles, or nonhuman mammals. The four known for targeting humans are transmitted from person to person by Anopheles mosquitoes. These four parasites possess wondrously complicated life histories, encompassing multiple metamorphoses and different forms in series: an asexual stage known as the sporozoite, which enters the human skin during a mosquito bite and migrates to the human liver; another asexual stage known as the merozoite, which emerges from the liver and reproduces in red blood cells; a stage known as the trophozoite, feeding and growing inside the blood cells, each of which fattens as a schizont and then bursts, releasing more merozoites to further multiply in the blood, and causing a spike of fever; a sexual stage known as the gametocyte, differentiated into male and female versions, which emerge from a later round of infected red blood cells, enter the bloodstream en masse, and are taken up within a blood meal by the next mosquito; a fertilized sexual stage known as the ookinete, which lodges in the gut lining of the mosquito, each ookinete ripening into a sort of egg sac filled with sporozoites; and then come the sporozoites again, bursting out of the egg sac and migrating to the mosquito’s salivary glands, where they lurk, ready to surge down the mosquito’s proboscis into another host. If you’ve followed all that, at a quick reading, you have a future in biology.”
“This elaborate concatenation of life-forms and sequential strategies is highly adaptive and, so far as mosquitoes and hosts are concerned, difficult to resist. It shows evolution’s power, over great lengths of time, to produce structures, tactics, and transformations of majestic intricacy. Alternatively, anyone who favors Intelligent Design in lieu of evolution might pause to wonder why God devoted so much of His intelligence to designing malarial parasites”
Source: Spillover
“Then another decade passed before filoviruses made their...
“Then another decade passed before filoviruses made their next appearance, in another shape, in an unexpected place: Reston, Virginia.
You know about this if you’ve read The Hot Zone, Richard Preston’s account of a 1989 outbreak of an Ebola-like virus among captive Asian monkeys at a lab-animal quarantine facility in suburban Reston, just across the Potomac from Washington, DC. Filovirus experts express mixed opinions about Preston’s book, but there’s no question that it did more than any journal article or newspaper story to make ebolaviruses infamous and terrifying to the general public. It also led to “a shower of funding,” one expert told me, for virologists “who before didn’t see a dime for their work on these exotic agents!” If this virus could massacre primates in their cages within a nondescript building in a Virginia office park, couldn’t it go anywhere and kill anyone?”
Source: Spillover
“Diseases of the future, needless to say, are...
“Diseases of the future, needless to say, are a matter of high concern to public health officials and scientists. There’s no reason to assume that AIDS will stand unique, in our time, as the only such global disaster caused by a strange microbe emerging from some other animal. Some knowledgeable and gloomy prognosticators even speak of the Next Big One as an inevitability. (If you’re a seismologist in California, the Next Big One is an earthquake that drops San Francisco into the sea, but in this realm of discourse it’s a vastly lethal pandemic.) Will the Next Big One be caused by a virus? Will the Next Big One come out of a rainforest or a market in southern China? Will the Next Big One kill 30 or 40 million people? The concept by now is so codified, in fact, that we could think of it as the NBO. The chief difference between HIV-1 and the NBO may turn out to be that HIV-1 does its killing so slowly. Most other new viruses work fast.”
Source: Spillover
If I had to pick the critical technology...
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before -- free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV…
…And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.
Such contemporary ‘sources’ which need to be treated...
Such contemporary ‘sources’ which need to be treated with caution are everywhere in the Napoleonic canon. The Comte de Montholon, who was with Napoleon on St Helena, wrote his supposed ‘narrative’ of his time on the island twenty years later, without contemporaneous notes, and his memoirs were ghosted by the novelist Alexandre Dumas, who also ghosted those of Napoleon’s favourite actor Talma. Laure d’Abrantès was banned from Paris by Napoleon in 1813, and by the time her memoirs appeared in the 1830s she was an opium addict who nonetheless claimed to have remembered verbatim long, intimate conversations with the Emperor. Several of her eighteen volumes of memoirs were ghosted by Balzac and written to stave off creditors. Those of Napoleon’s police chief Fouché were actually written by the hack-writer Alphonse de Beauchamp; those of one of Napoleon’s favourite mistresses, Mademoiselle George, were also drawn up by a ghost-writer, but she found them so boring that she sexed them up, with stories of Napoleon shoving wads of banknotes down her corset.
Source: "Napoleon the Great" by Andrew Roberts
“Mythology is the discourse we need in extremity....
“Mythology is the discourse we need in extremity. We have to be prepared to allow a myth to change us forever. Together with the rituals that break down the barrier between the listener and the story, and which help him to make it his own, a mythical narrative is designed to push us beyond the safe certainties of the familiar world into the unknown. Reading a myth without the transforming ritual that goes with it is as incomplete an experience as simply reading the lyrics of an opera without the music. Unless it is encountered as part of a process of regeneration, of death and rebirth, mythology makes no sense.
Source: A Short History Of Myth
“Anthropologists note that modern indigenous peoples frequently refer...
“Anthropologists note that modern indigenous peoples frequently refer to animals or birds as ‘peoples’ on the same level as themselves. They tell stories about humans becoming animals and vice versa; to kill an animal is to kill a friend, so tribesmen often feel guilt after a successful expedition. Because it is a sacred activity and charged with such high levels of anxiety, hunting is invested with ceremonial solemnity and surrounded with rites and taboos. Before an expedition, a hunter must abstain from sex and keep himself in a state of ritual purity; after the killing, the meat is stripped from the bones, and the skeleton, skull and pelt are carefully laid out in an attempt to reconstruct the animal and give it new life”
Source: A Short History Of Myth
“The Sky Gods of the ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic...
“The Sky Gods of the ancient Mesopotamians, Vedic Indians, Greeks and Canaanites all dwindled in this way. In all the mythology of all these peoples, the High God is at best a shadowy, powerless figure, marginal to the divine pantheon, and more dynamic, interesting and accessible deities, such as Indra, Enlil and Baal, had come to the fore. There are stories that explain how the High God was deposed: Ouranos, the Sky God of the Greeks, for example, was actually castrated by his son Kronos, in a myth that horribly illustrates the impotence of these Creators, who were so removed from the ordinary lives of human beings that they had become peripheral. People experienced the sacred power of Baal in every rainstorm; they felt the force of Indra every time they were possessed by the transcendent fury of battle. But the old Sky Gods did not touch people’s lives at all. This very early development makes it clear that mythology will not succeed if it concentrates on the supernatural; it will only remain vital if it is primarily concerned with humanity.”
Source: A Short History Of Myth
If you go to the Pacific Northwest today,...
If you go to the Pacific Northwest today, never having been there before, you will not notice the declining salmon runs, the PCBs in Puget Sound, or the toxic orcas. Like so many other environmental disasters, these critical problems are unrecognizable without prior knowledge or baseline information—essential reference points from the past. On a good day, Seattle looks as gorgeous as it ever has, ferries plying the sparkling water on the sound, bald eagles perched in the evergreens, sea lions bobbing alongside boats. A recent poll in the area found that, while 90 percent of the public wanted Puget Sound protected, over 70 percent thought it was perfectly healthy and not in need of restoration.30 The inability to recognize the severity of environmental problems, due to a lack of historical knowledge of ecosystems, represents a serious threat to ecological restoration and public support of it. That phenomenon—the failure to recognize damage already suffered by natural systems—has been dubbed “shifting baselines” by a group of marine biologists and divers who launched a media project and Web site, illustrated with short videos, to describe the problem.
Source: Rewilding the world
An experiment that was conducted a few years...
An experiment that was conducted a few years ago with Harvard undergraduates yielded a finding that surprised me: enhanced activation of System 2 caused a significant improvement of predictive accuracy in the Tom W problem. The experiment combined the old problem with a modern variation of cognitive fluency. Half the students were told to puff out their cheeks during the task, while the others were told to frown. Frowning, as we have seen, generally increases the vigilance of System 2 and reduces both overconfidence and the reliance on intuition. The students who puffed out their cheeks (an emotionally neutral expression) replicated the original results: they relied exclusively on representativeness and ignored the base rates. As the authors had predicted, however, the frowners did show some sensitivity to the base rates. This is an instructive finding.
Source: Thinking Fast and slow
Opinions are also divided on the second example...
Opinions are also divided on the second example Kuran and Sunstein used to illustrate their concept of an availability cascade, the Alar incident, known to detractors of environmental concerns as the “Alar scare” of 1989. Alar is a chemical that was sprayed on apples to regulate their growth and improve their appearance. The scare began with press stories that the chemical, when consumed in gigantic doses, caused cancerous tumors in rats and mice. The stories understandably frightened the public, and those fears encouraged more media coverage, the basic mechanism of an availability cascade. The topic dominated the news and produced dramatic media events such as the testimony of the actress Meryl Streep before Congress. The apple industry sustained large losses as apples and apple products became objects of fear. Kuran and Sunstein quote a citizen who called in to ask “whether it was safer to pour apple juice down the drain or to take it to a toxic waste dump.” The manufacturer withdrew the product and the FDA banned it. Subsequent research confirmed that the substance might pose a very small risk as a possible carcinogen, but the Alar incident was certainly an enormous overreaction to a minor problem. The net effect of the incident on public health was probably detrimental because fewer good apples were consumed.
Source: Thinking Fast and slow
The metaphors of neuroscience – computers, coding, wiring...
The metaphors of neuroscience – computers, coding, wiring diagrams and so on – are inevitably partial. That is the nature of metaphors, which have been intensely studied by philosophers of science and by scientists, as they seem to be so central to the way scientists think.15 But metaphors are also rich and allow insight and discovery. There will come a point when the understanding they allow will be outweighed by the limits they impose, but in the case of computational and representational metaphors of the brain there is no agreement that such a moment has arrived.16 From a historical point of view, the very fact that this debate is taking place suggests that we may indeed be approaching the end of the computational metaphor. What is not clear, however, is what would replace it.
Source: The idea of the brain
Libet’s work is generally taken to undermine the...
Libet’s work is generally taken to undermine the notion of free will – our feeling that we can choose how to behave. In a very complicated experiment that has since been replicated many times in various forms, Libet found that EEG traces which revealed subjects’ intentions to move a finger slightly preceded their conscious decision to do so. For many scientists and some philosophers, this finding suggested that consciousness and free will, in the form of a mental homunculus, are an illusion. The conscious sensation of deciding to move your finger, they claim, is a rationalisation of a decision that has already been taken by your nervous system. The strong interpretation is that we have no free will, being controlled instead by neuronal activity that is not immediately available to consciousness, but which is ‘made sense of’ immediately afterwards. Although the results of Libet’s experiment are not in question, this interpretation and its implications are still disputed.65 One recent study has shown that Libet’s basic finding holds only if subjects are making arbitrary choices, not if they are making important, deliberate decisions.66 This issue is far from being resolved.
Source: The idea of the brain
In his sprawling 1981 masterwork, Mind in Science,...
In his sprawling 1981 masterwork, Mind in Science, Gregory questioned whether this was actually true, pointing out that particular functions could rarely be revealed by removing parts one by one: One finds, rather, that bizarre things happen when parts are removed; or nothing may happen, except under special conditions such as extreme demands or loading. For example, spokes of a bicycle wheel can be removed, one by one with little effect until there is a sudden collapse. Removing parts from an electrical circuit may produce output characteristics that were not present – such as whistles for a radio or complex patterns for a television … In truth the relations between parts, and their causal interactions, and the functions that they achieve, are highly complex and subtle beyond common understanding. It is particularly difficult to say where functions are located. This is a most serious problem for brain research.
Source: The idea of the brain
The pursuit of the genetic bases of mental...
The pursuit of the genetic bases of mental health disorders has, in one case at least, led to a dead end. From the late 1990s researchers became interested in a gene that codes for a serotonin transporter called SLC6A4. Variants in the gene seemed to be linked to depression, fitting in with the SSRI model. Hundreds of papers were published, virtually all of them contributing to a scientific consensus in which SLC6A4, along with a number of other genes, held the key to understanding depression, and in particular the link with anxiety. In 2019 researchers studied the role of all these genes using massive data sets (up to 443,264 individuals) and rigorous statistical techniques that required them to describe expected results before doing the study, rather than endlessly fishing for statistical significance afterwards. Their conclusion was that all that time and effort had been wasted; there was no evidence that the eighteen genes that were thought to play a role in depression, including SLC6A4, actually do so.
Source: The idea of the brain
Many courses on regression and linear models emphasise...
Many courses on regression and linear models emphasise the technical aspects of fitting and testing models. In practice, the hardest challenges facing an applied statistician relate to issues of how to construct and interpret appropriate models in such a way that you (the statistician) can help provide reasonable answers to empirical research questions. While technical material is generally easier to teach we place as much emphasis as possible on these less tangible issues, which are not any easier than the more technical material just because they involve less mathematics
Source: LMR study guide
However, the reality of scotophobin soon began to...
However, the reality of scotophobin soon began to evaporate. In July 1972 Ungar published an article in Nature in which he claimed that scotophobin induced dark-avoidance and speculated that there might be many such behaviourally active molecules in the nervous system.57 The article had been submitted to the journal seventeen months earlier; the reason for this long delay between submission and publication was that one of the referees involved in peer review of the paper, Walter Stewart, felt strongly that the whole thing was nonsense. In a highly unusual step, Nature eventually decided to publish Ungar’s article, but to accompany it by a long paper from Stewart detailing his criticisms of Ungar’s biochemical claims, including with regard to the synthetic version of the molecule. Stewart argued that, despite having already published seventeen scientific articles on the topic, covering more than a hundred pages, Ungar’s group had not provided the necessary experimental detail to allow the work to be replicated and its claims to be tested. His conclusion was that ‘the authors’ conclusions are more likely false than true’.58 Despite a brief riposte from Ungar in the same issue of Nature, the effect of Stewart’s critique was devastating. Improved behavioural measures and better biochemistry soon revealed that there was no transfer of learning, and that if scotophobin did exist it was probably a polypeptide, perhaps produced as a consequence of stress when the animals were shocked, and had nothing to do with learning.59 Funding for transfer-of-learning experiments dried up virtually immediately, as something that had excited the scientific community and beyond for years turned out to be an illusion.60 Scotophobin became neuroscience’s version of N-rays, a form of radiation that briefly obsessed physicists at the beginning of the twentieth century but which turned out not to exist.61 The exact origin of the widespread behavioural effects that were reported remain unclear, but neither engrams nor the fear of light can be transferred from one animal to another in a syringe. Nevertheless, recent research confirms that memories can indeed reappear in the regenerated head of a planarian, suggesting that not everything done at this time was complete nonsense
Source: The idea of the brain
As with most scientific discoveries, if Adrian had...
As with most scientific discoveries, if Adrian had not done this work, someone else would have done so at about the same time. That is the nature of science – with very few exceptions, if researcher X had fallen under a bus, events would have proceeded on something like the same path, through the work of researcher Y. But in one key respect Adrian’s contribution to our understanding of how the brain works did not depend on his experimental studies and was much more due to his own unique attributes. Throughout his early career, Adrian produced popular accounts of his work, leading him to think about what nerves do in a rather different way from that expressed in his scientific papers. It was in these writings, searching for ways of explaining what he had discovered to the general public, that Adrian assembled some existing terms in novel ways, with lasting effect. These concepts – messages, codes and information – now form the basis of our fundamental scientific ideas about how the brain works.
Source: The idea of the Brain
Indeed, the belief that only fathers mattered led...
Indeed, the belief that only fathers mattered led horse breeders astray: they failed to race mares, and then took the ludicrously expensive imported Arabian stallions and crossed them with random mares, and then took the sub-par performance of their offspring as evidence that race performance was critically dependent on the dry Arabian environment and they simply had to keep importing & crossing.
Source: Gwern
We now know that here are an indefinitely...
We now know that here are an indefinitely long list of ways that development can go wrong with thousands of environmental insults or developmental error or distinct genetic diseases (each with many possible contributing mutations), and that for the most part, each case is its own special case; sometimes ‘monsters’ can shed light on key aspects of biology like metabolic pathways, but that requires biology centuries more advanced than was available, and that the search for universal principles was futile. There are universal principles but they pertain mostly to populations, must be investigated in the aggregate, statistically, and individual counterexamples can only be shrugged at, as the universal principles can be and often are overridden by many of those special cases.
Source: Gwern
Darwin has often been depicted as a radical...
Darwin has often been depicted as a radical selectionist at heart who invoked other mechanisms only in retreat, and only as a result of his age's own lamented ignorance about the mechanisms of heredity. This view is false. Although Darwin regarded selection as the most important of evolutionary mechanisms (as do we), no argument from opponents angered him more than the common attempt to caricature and trivialize his theory by stating that it relied exclusively upon natural selection. In the last edition of the Origin, he wrote (I872, p. 395):
'As my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and sub- sequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position - namely at the close of the Introduction -the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main, but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misinterpretation.'
Source: The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme
An extraordinary number of modern inventions were made...
An extraordinary number of modern inventions were made more than once, and the statistician Stephen Stigler even proposed a law that no discovery is ever named after its real discoverer (Stigler’s Law, he observed, was actually discovered by the sociologist Robert Merton twenty-five years earlier).
Source: Why the West rules
I normally call this “nuance”. That is a...
I normally call this “nuance”. That is a very optimistic term. The pessimistic term is “a giant incoherent mess of sadness.”
Link: https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/i-ing-hate-science/
The odd thing about the Renaissance was that...
The odd thing about the Renaissance was that this apparently reactionary struggle to re-create antiquity in fact produced a wildly untraditional culture of invention and open-ended inquiry. There certainly were conservative voices, banishing some of the more radical thinkers (such as Machiavelli) to drain the bitter cup of exile and intimidating others (such as Galileo) into silence, but they barely blunted the thrust of new ideas.
Source: Why the West rules
Archaeologists often suffer from an affliction that I...
Archaeologists often suffer from an affliction that I like to call Egypt envy. No matter where we dig or what we dig up, we always suspect we would find better things if we were digging in Egypt. So it is a relief to know that Egypt envy affects people in other walks of life too. In 1995 State Councillor Song Jian, one of China’s top scientific administrators, made an official visit to Egypt. He was not happy when archaeologists told him that its antiquities were older than China’s, so on returning to Beijing he launched the Three Dynasties Chronology Project to look into the matter. Four years and $2 million later, it announced its findings: Egypt’s antiquities really are older than China’s. But now at least we know exactly how much older.
Source: Why the West Rules
Truly exceptional individuals, weak or strong, are, by...
Truly exceptional individuals, weak or strong, are, by definition, to be found at the extremes of statistical curves…Since each individual produced by the sexual process contains a unique set of genes, very exceptional combinations of genes are unlikely to appear twice even within the same family. So if genius is to any extent hereditary, it winks on and off through the gene pool in a way that would be difficult to measure or predict. Like Sisyphus rolling his boulder up to the top of the hill only to have it tumble down again, the human gene pool creates hereditary genius in many ways in many places only to have it come apart in the next generation.”
Source: On Human Nature 1978
Score sheets, the critics insisted, obscure more than...
Score sheets, the critics insisted, obscure more than they reveal, masking the peculiarities of individual cultures. I certainly found that to be true when I was studying the origins of democracy in the 1990s. The ancient Greek cities that invented this form of government were really peculiar; many of their residents honestly believed that instead of asking priests what the gods thought, the best way to find the truth was to get all the men together on the side of a hill, argue, and take a vote. Giving ancient Greece a score for differentiation does not explain where democracy came from, and burying the Greeks’ peculiarity somewhere in an index of social development can actually make the task harder by diverting attention from their unique achievements.
Source: Why the West Rules
These matters continued to be widely debated, of...
These matters continued to be widely debated, of course, and some at least also regarded the Germans themselves as victims of the Second World War. Yet in the early twenty-first century, Germany’s capital city has a large public memorial to the Jewish victims of Nazism at its very centre, German concentration camps have become public museums to Nazi atrocities, and on the streets of a growing number of German towns and cities brass plates have been put on to the pavements outside houses and shops that belonged to Jews before 1933, with the names of their former owners inscribed on them. German historians have exposed the long-denied involvement of many sectors of the German population in the crimes of the Third Reich, from the officers and men of the army to the doctors and scientists who staffed Germany’s hospitals and research institutes. Former slave labourers have launched successful actions to gain recognition and a small amount of compensation for their sufferings, and the businesses and companies that profited from the Nazi regime and its policies have opened their archives and admitted their complicity. Artworks and cultural objects expropriated from their Jewish owners under the Third Reich have been catalogued and galleries, museums and state authorities have opened the way for the restitution of those that have not yet been returned.
Source: Third Reich at War, Richard Evans
“Such is life,” although rarely is it described...
“Such is life,” although rarely is it described in this manner: an inserting itself, a drawing off to its advantage, a parasitizing of the downward course of energy, from its noble solar form to the degraded one of low-temperature heat. In this downward course, which leads to equilibrium and thus death, life draws a bend and nests in it
Source: The Periodic Table
In his first letter he had spoken of...
In his first letter he had spoken of “overcoming the past,” “Bewältigung der Vergangenheit”: I later found out that this is a stereotyped phrase, a euphemism in today’s Germany, where it is universally understood as “redemption from Nazism”; but the root wait that it contains also appears in the words that express “domination,” “violence,” and “rape,” and I believe that translating the expression with “distortion of the past” or “violence done to the past” would not stray very far from its profound meaning.
Source: The Periodic Table
In the summer, when he went off by...
In the summer, when he went off by himself, he often took along a dog to keep him company. This was a small yellow mongrel with a downcast expression; in fact, as Sandro had told me, acting out in his way the animal episode, as a puppy he had had a mishap with a cat. He had come too close to a litter of newborn kittens, the mother cat was miffed and became enraged, and had begun to hiss, getting all puffed up; but the puppy had not yet learned the meaning of those signals and remained there like a fool. The cat had attacked him, chased him, caught him, and scratched his nose; the dog had been permanently traumatized. He felt dishonored, and so Sandro had made him a cloth ball, explained to him that it was the cat, and every morning presented it to him so that he could take his revenge on it for the insult and regain his canine honor. For the same therapeutic motive, Sandro took him to the mountains, so he could have some fun: he tied him to one end of a rope, tied himself to the other, set the dog firmly on a rock ledge, and then climbed up; when the rope ended, he pulled it up slowly, and the dog had learned to walk up with his muzzle pointed skywards and his four paws against the nearly vertical wall of rock, moaning softly as though he were dreaming.
It was also said that he had spent his entire academic career demolishing a certain theory of stereo-chemistry, not with experiments but with publications. The experiments were performed by someone else, his great rival, in some unknown part of the world; as he proceeded, the reports appeared in the Helvetica Chemica Acta, and Professor P. tore them apart one by one.
Source: The Periodic Table
Here the Soviet generals launched a counter-attack, with...
Here the Soviet generals launched a counter-attack, with the aim of encircling and destroying the German forces. The leading Soviet tank general Pavel Rotmistrov sent in fresh forces, advancing up to 380 kilometres from the rear in a mere three days with more than 800 tanks. Keeping some in reserve, he sent 400 of these in from the north-east, and another 200 from the east, against the battle-weary German forces, who were taken completely by surprise. With only 186 armoured vehicles, a mere 117 of them tanks, the German forces faced total destruction. But the Soviet tank-drivers, tired after three days’ driving and perhaps also fired up, as Red Army troops often were, by liberal doses of vodka, failed to notice a massive, 4.5-metre-deep anti-tank trench dug not long before by Soviet pioneers as part of Zhukov’s preparations for the battle. The first lines of T-34s fell straight into the ditch, and when those following on finally saw the danger, they veered aside in panic, crashed into one another and burst into flames as the Germans opened fire. By the middle of the day the Germans were reporting 190 wrecked or deserted Soviet tanks on the battlefield, some of them still burning. The number seemed so unbelievable that a senior general arrived personally to verify it. The loss of so many tanks enraged Stalin, who threatened to have Rotmistrov court-martialled. To save his skin, the general agreed with his commanding officer and with the senior political commissar in the area – Nikita Khrushchev – to claim that the tanks had been lost in a vast battle in which more than 400 German tanks had been destroyed by the heroic Soviet forces. Stalin, whose idea it had originally been to send Rotmistrov’s forces into the fray, was obliged to accept their report. It became the source of a long-lived legend that marked Prochorovka as the ‘greatest tank battle in history’. In reality it was one of history’s greatest military fiascos. The Soviet forces lost a total of 235 tanks, the Germans three. Despite all this, Rotmistrov became a hero, and today a large monument marks the site.
Source: Third Reich at war
“James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor...
“James Dewar (later Sir James, and the inventor of the Dewar flask and hence of the thermos bottle), of the Royal Institute in London, in 1897 liquefied fluorine, which had been isolated by Moisson only eleven years before, and reported that the density of the liquid was 1.108. This wildly (and inexplicably) erroneous value (the actual density is 1.50) was duly embalmed in the literature, and remained there, unquestioned, for almost sixty years, to the confusion of practically everybody.”
Source: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
Women’s share in the German civilian labour force...
Women’s share in the German civilian labour force did increase, according to one estimate, from 37 per cent in 1939 to 51 per cent in 1944, and there were also 3.5 million women working part-time in shifts of up to eight hours by this latter date. But of course the German civilian labour force was shrinking all the time. More and more German men were leaving for the front, so the actual number of German women in paid employment only increased from 14,626,000 in May 1939 to 14,897,000 in September 1944.
Source: Third Reich at war
“The book is written not only for the...
“The book is written not only for the interested layman—and for him I have tried to make things as simple as possible—but also for the professional engineer in the rocket business. For I have discovered that he is frequently abysmally ignorant of the history of his own profession, and, unless forcibly restrained, is almost certain to do something which, as we learned fifteen years ago, is not only stupid but is likely to result in catastrophe. Santayana knew exactly what he was talking about”
Source: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants
Even a frog was to be carried on...
Even a frog was to be carried on board, not a leaping frog, but one whose inner ear was wired and who was encased in a miniature centrifuge. After enjoying weightlessness for prescribed intervals, the frog was to be periodically spun up on the centrifuge, and his otolith function duly recorded. The crew couldn’t even warn the poor suffering little bastard, but merely flipped a FROG switch to ON, and away he went. Imagine that, a FROG ON-OFF switch, hardly work for test pilots.
Source: Carrying the Fire
Of course the very heart of the matter...
Of course the very heart of the matter is that NASA, which loves redundant systems, has never been able to figure out a practical way of providing redundant pressure shells. By that I mean that between the little soft pink body of the astronaut and the hard vacuum of space there is only one thin shell of aluminum (the spacecraft) or of rubber (the pressure suit bladder). To this basic fact add the complication of having to glue that rubber bladder together from an individually tailored array of body-fitting fragments. When you think of a space walker, you may visualize a chap confidently exploiting the most advanced technology which this rich and powerful nation can provide, but not me, friends. I see a covey of little old ladies hunched over their glue pots in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I only hope that between discussions of Friday-night bingo and the new monsignor, their attention doesn’t wander too far. Maybe it’s basic insanity to abandon hearth and home to dance in space on the end of a fifty-foot cord.
Source: Carrying the fire
Steno’s view that the brain was not simply...
Steno’s view that the brain was not simply like a machine, but actually was some kind of device, was part of a shift in view that took place in seventeenth-century Europe. Philosophers and physicians became comfortable about using mechanical metaphors when thinking about the body (the same view was also extended to the whole universe, with the regularity of celestial mechanics being seen in terms of some cosmic clockwork). For example, in 1641 the philosopher Thomas Hobbes asked rhetorically: ‘For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole.’
Source: The Idea of the Brain
To properly understand the past, to provide a...
To properly understand the past, to provide a full background to today’s theories and frameworks, and even to imagine what tomorrow may hold, we must remember that past ideas were not seen as steps on the road to our current understanding. They were fully fledged views in their own right, in all their complexity and lack of clarity. Every idea, no matter how outdated, was once modern, exciting and new. We can be amused at strange ideas from the past, but condescension is not allowed – what seems obvious to us is only that way because past errors, which were generally difficult to detect, were eventually overcome through a great deal of hard work and harder thinking.
Source: The Idea of the Brain
The other side of the matter, the perception...
A personal note here: this indicates that much of the biochemistry I have been taught is within a particular paradigm of thought. That is that biological systems are constructed in a way that mirrors the ideas of information theory. It seems to me that the influence of information theory may have been what drove biologists to conceive of biological systems in those terms! Discrete transfers of energy and bioinformatics as a concept. This is in contrast to the bucket chemistry style approach of classical biochemistry. What do we miss by only exploring within our own paradigm?
The other side of the matter, the perception of the biological code as an abstract problem distinguishable from the biochemistry, had few and isolated forerunners—and the fact is surprising. The late forties, after all, were the years when information theory, turned loose from the armorers’ workshops, grew with world-conquering confidence and was publicized throughout the sciences as well as to laymen. A fundamental of information theory, unforgettable for example to anyone who read Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics—the book came out in 1948 and aroused wide discussion—was the unique status of information as something that could be transferred at almost no cost in energy and yet with hugely multiplied consequences…
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
In a sense the evolution of biological molecules...
William James Astbury quoted in the Eighth day of Creation
In a sense the evolution of biological molecules has been one long story of numerology, a sifting and sorting of shapes and sizes and a progressive selection of molecular patterns that has been going on throughout the ages.
Source: Eighth day of Creation
Indeed, a density gradient is a subtle refinement...
Indeed, a density gradient is a subtle refinement of the insight upon which Archimedes shouted “Eureka!” Archimedes made his discovery in the bathtub; Meselson began his at the dinner table. “In the house where we lived at Caltech, in the guest room, on the wall, we had a periodic table of the elements,” Meselson said. “It was a big chart, made of oilcloth, a beautiful chart. And the first experiment we did was at dinner. We had sugar on the table—I remember the evening very clearly, Frank and I and some other people—and I just put sugar, a lot of sugar, in a glass, and filled it with water, and then cut off a piece of fingernail and dropped it in—just to see if you could float, in a solution like that, materials of the density of DNA. I mean, we didn’t know exactly the density of DNA—though we sure did later—but fingernail seemed a reasonable analogy. And as I remember, the fingernail sinks, even in the strongest sugar solution. So we needed something denser. We went to the chart in the guest room and said, ‘Well, we want something like table salt, sodium chloride, but very dense,’ so we read straight down the chart from sodium to the heavier elements that are chemically similar—sodium, potassium, rubidium, and then there’s cesium, which is the last naturally occurring element in that group. And we could have used other salts of cesium, the bromide, the iodide, but we knew that the chloride was the most chemically stable and least likely to hurt the DNA. So we chose cesium chloride.”
Source: Eighth Day of creation
Discovery, examined closely, I said to Crick, seemed...
Discovery, examined closely, I said to Crick, seemed curiously difficult to pin to a moment or to an insight or even to a single person. “No, I don’t think that’s curious,” Crick said. “I think that’s the nature of discoveries, many times: that the reason they’re difficult to make is that you’ve got to take a series of steps, three or four steps, which if you don’t make them you won’t get there, and if you go wrong in any one of them you won’t get there. It isn’t a matter of one jump—that would be easy. You’ve got to make several successive jumps. And usually the pennies drop one after another until eventually it all clicks. Otherwise it would be too easy!”
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
Watson attended a seminar by Franklin in 1951....
Watson attended a seminar by Franklin in 1951. From the seminar he and Crick put together an incorrect model for DNA. Turns out it was Rosalind Franklin herself who decinstructed the model when she was invited along with Wilkins and Gosling to appraise it:
"Franklin led the attack on the model itself. By Watson’s account seventeen years later, she was adamant that “there was not a shred of evidence that DNA was helical.” The notes she had prepared a few days earlier and the fellowship report she submitted a few weeks later bracket this encounter, to give the true range of her opinion: in fact at the time she was not firmly set against helices. What she could correctly have said was that her best x-ray pictures of DNA so far—those of the crystalline form—failed to show the pattern characteristic of a helical structure. It was true also that while her pictures of the second, wet form presented helical features, these were not unequivocal—but she may never have gone into the details of the wet pattern, any more than she had in her notes for the colloquium. The model had two more deficiencies, each crippling. The backbones could not be inside. Finally, a glance told her and a word told them all that the model did not contain enough water—which Crick then had to recognize was not just Watson’s lapse of memory but his own lapse of basic chemistry, for those charged sodium or magnesium ions would strongly attract water. “Jim said there was no water there. With little water, the electrostatic forces would be very strong,” Crick told me. “That was reasonable given that what Jim said was reasonable, but what I should have known was that what Jim said wasn’t reasonable. Anybody who knew any chemistry would have known there was a lot of water just from first principles!” With the water put back in, very many other models were once more compatible with the rest of the data. By Wednesday afternoon, less than a week since Franklin’s seminar, Watson and Crick’s first model for DNA had been flooded out."
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
in his application to the Medical Research Council...
in his application to the Medical Research Council for a research student’s grant, Crick wrote: The particular field which excites my interest is the division between the living and the non-living, as typified by, say, proteins, viruses, bacteria and the structure of chromosomes. The eventual goal, which is somewhat remote, is the description of these activities in terms of their structure, i.e. the spatial distribution of their constituent atoms, in so far as this may prove possible. This might be called the chemical physics of biology. It might be called a definition of molecular biology.
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
It should be said, then, that Crick has...
It should be said, then, that Crick has to a pronounced degree a habit that most scientists cultivate, a careful and constant self-depreciation that distinguishes between what a man knows for sure and what he knows only speculatively or by hearsay. “I do not speak now from secure knowledge,” said one, expressing a typical care with a graceful turn; or as Crick sometimes puts it, “I don’t know this subject, I only know about it.” The habit has little to do with modesty. It is a hedge against being caught in error. More, it is an intellectual courtesy, a running contribution to evaluation of the weight of statements in truth-seeking talk.
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
“DNA, you know, is Midas’ gold. Everybody who...
Quote from Maurice Wilkins
“DNA, you know, is Midas’ gold. Everybody who touches it goes mad.”
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
I saw before me in dark contours the...
Erwing Chargaff quoted in The Eighth Day of Creation
I saw before me in dark contours the beginning of a grammar of biology…. Avery gave us the first text of a new language, or rather he showed us where to look for it. I resolved to search for this text. Consequently, I decided to relinquish all that we had been working on or to bring it to a quick conclusion…. But these biographical bagatelles cannot be of interest to anybody. To the scientist nature is as a mirror that breaks every thirty years; and who cares about the broken glass of past times? I started from the conviction that, if different DNA species exhibited different biological activities, there should also exist chemically demonstrable differences between deoxyribonucleic acids.
Source: The Eighth Day of Creation
In a conversation a few weeks earlier at...
In a conversation a few weeks earlier at the faculty club of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a couple of biologists had speculated whether Pauling, whose recent popular book on the benefits to health and sanity of massive doses of vitamin C was stacked in display near the entrance of the M.I.T. bookstore, was showing signs of what one of the men called “old scientist’s disease”—which they defined as what happens to great men when they grow beyond the psychological reach of the salutary system by which scientists blow the whistle on one another’s mistakes.
Source: Eighth day of creation
Pauling’s political stand in the last years of...
Pauling’s political stand in the last years of the Truman presidency seems mild enough now, a rather flamboyantly idealistic campaign against the cold war, against atomic weapons and the development of the hydrogen bomb. In those days of the rise of Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, when the national anxieties reverberated into hysteria in Southern California, Pauling’s course took courage and principle. His politics had unpleasant consequences at the time. At the end of April 1952, Pauling was supposed to go to London to attend a meeting of the Royal Society on the structure of proteins, but at the last minute was refused a passport.
Source: Eighth day of creation
“When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as...
Richard Preston
“When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog. Now the road was paved and had a stripe painted down the center, and it carried a continual flow of vehicles. The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of AIDS, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.”
Source: The Hot Zone
“So I don’t really see, in retrospect, that...
Delbruck, Eighth day of creation
“So I don’t really see, in retrospect, that Avery had been neglected. I think certainly all the people who were seriously interested in what we now call molecular genetics, which at that time didn’t have that name—interested in the nature of the gene—those who were fully aware of the data and were discussing it, to the extent that it could be discussed, they clearly saw the three alternatives. That it was contamination and not DNA at all. Or that the transformation was not really specific but just a special case, a physiological switch. Or that the DNA does carry specificity—but even if it did carry specificity then nobody, absolutely nobody, until the day of the Watson-Crick structure, had thought that the specificity might be carried in this exceedingly simple way, by a sequence, by a code. This dénouement that came then—that the whole business was like a child’s toy that you could buy at the dime store”—Delbrück laughed and shook his head—“all built in this wonderful way that you could explain in Life magazine so that really a five-year-old can understand what’s going on. That there was so simple a trick behind it.” He laughed again, the same rueful way. “This was the greatest surprise for everyone.”
Source: Eighth day of creation
The main moral of priming research is that...
The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can affect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? Anchoring effects are threatening in a similar way.
Source: Thinking Fast and Slow
It was queer how for nearly six months...
It was queer how for nearly six months past I had had no eyes for such things. With my discharge papers in my pocket I felt like a human being again, and also a little like a tourist. For almost the first time I felt that I was really in Spain, in a country that I had longed all my life to visit. In the quiet back streets of Lérida and Barbastro I seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of the Spain that dwells in everyone's imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Málaga and Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades—in short, Spain. Of all Europe it was the country that had had most hold upon my imagination. It seemed a pity that when at last I had managed to come here I had seen only this north-eastern corner, in the middle of a confused war and for the most part in winter.
Source: Orwell, Homage to Catalonia
In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe...
In 2010, a corrupt policewoman demanded a bribe from impoverished pushcart vendor Mohammed Bouazizi. He couldn't afford it. She confiscated his goods, insulted him, and (according to some sources) slapped him. He was humiliated and destitute and had no hope of ever getting back at a police officer. So he made the very reasonable decision to douse himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in the public square. One thing led to another, and eventually a mostly-peaceful revolution ousted the government of Tunisia. I am very sorry for Mr. Bouazizi and his family. But he did find a way to make the offending policewoman remember the day she harassed him as something other than Tuesday. As the saying goes, "sometimes setting yourself on fire sheds light on the situation".
I went back to my post on the...
I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and fury. When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct 'analysis' of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse—for none of us had had a proper meal since Monday.
Source: Homage to Catalonia
“Colonel Clarence James Peters, MD. He was the...
“Colonel Clarence James Peters, MD. He was the chief of the disease-assessment division at the Institute, the doctor who dealt with the dangerous unknowns. (“The interesting stuff,” as he called it.) C. J. Peters had built up this division almost singlehandedly, and he ran it singlehandedly. He was a strange sort of military man, easygoing and casually brilliant. He had wire-rimmed glasses, a round, ruddy, pleasant face with a mustache, a light Texas drawl. He was not a large man, but he liked to eat, and he believed himself to be overweight. He spoke fluent Spanish, which he had learned during his years in the jungles of Central and South America, hunting for hot agents. He was required by Army regulations to show up for work at eight o’clock in the morning, but he usually drifted in around ten o’clock, and then worked until all hours of the night. He disliked wearing a uniform. Usually he wore faded blue jeans with a flaming Hawaiian shirt, along with sandals and dweebish white socks, looking like he had just spent the night in a Mexican hotel. “His excuse for his lack of uniform was that he suffered from athlete’s foot, an incurable tropical strain that he’d picked up in Central America and could never quite get rid of, and so he had to wear socks with sandals in order to keep air circulating around his toes—and the jeans and the flaming shirt were part of the package.
C. J. Peters could swim through a bureaucracy like a shark. He inspired great loyalty in his staff, and he made enemies easily and deliberately, when it suited him or the needs of his staff. He drove a red Toyota that had seen better days. On his travels in rain forests and tropical savannas, he ate with pleasure whatever the locals were eating. He had consumed frogs, snakes, zebra meat, jellyfish, lizards, and toads cooked whole in their skin, but he thought he had never eaten salamanders, at least none that he had been able to identify in a soup. He had eaten boiled monkey thigh, and he had drunk banana beer fermented with human saliva. In central Africa, while leading an expedition in search of Ebola virus, he had found himself in termite country during swarming season, and he had waited by termite nests and collected the termites as they swarmed out and had eaten them raw. He thought they had a nice sort of nutty taste. He liked termites so much that he refrigerated them with his blood samples, to keep the termites fresh all day so that he could snack on them like peanuts with his evening gin as the sun went down over the African plains. He was fond of suffocated guinea pig baked in its own blood and viscera. The guinea pig is split open like a book, offering treasures, and he enjoyed picking out and eating the guinea pig’s lungs, adrenal glands, and brain. And then, inevitably, he would pay a price. “I always get sick, but it’s worth it,” he once said to me. He was a great believer in maps, and his offices always contained many maps hung on the walls, showing locations of outbreaks of virus.”
Source: The Hot Zone
“The cave itself was considered to be a...
“The cave itself was considered to be a Level 4 hot zone. The tarp closest to the cave covered a gray area, a place where the worlds met. The men took chemical showers under the gray-area tarp, to decon their space suits after a visit to the cave. Another tarp covered a Level 3 staging area, where the men changed in and out of their space suits. Another tarp covered a Level 4 necropsy area. Under that tarp, wearing space suits, they dissected any small animals they had trapped, looking for signs of Marburg virus.
“We were going where no one had gone before,” Johnson said to me. “We brought the Biosafety Level 4 philosophy to the jungle.”
Source: The Hot Zone
It was also impossible to ignore the widespread...
It was also impossible to ignore the widespread irritation, even anger and fear, aroused more widely by the ubiquity of street collections which, a Social Democratic agent reported in 1935, had ‘completely assumed the character of organized highway robbery’. ‘The importunity is so great’, reported another agent, ‘that nobody can escape it.’ ‘Last year one could still speak of it as a nuisance,’ one informant complained of the Winter Aid in December 1935, ‘but this winter it has become a plague of the first degree.’ There were not only Winter Aid collections but also Hitler Youth collections for the building of new youth hostels, collections for the support of Germans abroad, collections for air-raid shelters, collections for needy ‘old fighters’, a lottery for the benefit of job creation, and many more collections for local schemes. There were pay deductions for the Volkswagen car and workplace contributions for Strength Through Joy and Beauty of Labour, and much, much more. Such contributions, whether in kind or in money or in the form of unpaid voluntary work, amounted in effect to a new, informal tax.
Source: The Third Reich in Power
Even with hours of leisure, men who had...
Even with hours of leisure, men who had been “bookish ” could not read. That was a common phenomenon. I could read hardly at all, for years, and thousands were like me. The most “exciting” novel was dull stuff up against that world convulsion. What did the romance of love mean, the little tortures of one man’s heart, or one woman’s, troubled in their mating, when thousands of men were being killed and vast populations were in agony? History—Greek or Roman or medieval—what was the use of reading that old stuff, now that world history was being made with a rush? Poetry—poor poets with their love of beauty! What did beauty matter, now that it lay dead in the soul of the world, under the filth of battlefields, and the dirt of hate and cruelty, and the law of the apelike man? No—we could not read; but talked and talked about the old philosophy of life, and the structure of society, and Democracy and Liberty and Patriotism and Internationalism, and Brotherhood of Men, and God, and Christian ethics; and then talked no more, because all words were futile, and just brooded and brooded, after searching the daily paper (two days old) for any kind of hope and light, not finding either.
Source: Now it can be told
To devise a plan, to conceive the idea...
To devise a plan, to conceive the idea of the solution is not easy. It takes so much to succeed; formerly acquired knowledge, good mental habits, concentration upon the purpose, and one more thing: good luck.
Source: How to solve it
We have a plan when we know, or...
We have a plan when we know, or know at least in outline, which calculations, computations, or constructions we have to perform in order to obtain the unknown. The way from understanding the problem to conceiving a plan may be long and tortuous. In fact, the main achievement in the solution of a problem is to conceive the idea of a plan.
Source: How to solve it
Because System 1 represents categories by a prototype...
Because System 1 represents categories by a prototype or a set of typical exemplars, it deals well with averages but poorly with sums.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
The peasantry were generally assigned in German political...
The peasantry were generally assigned in German political discourse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to that peculiar and amorphous social group known by the untranslatable German appellation of the Mittelstand. This term expressed in the first place the aspirations of right-wing propagandists that the people who were neither bourgeois nor proletarian should have a recognized place in society. Roughly equivalent to the French petite bourgeoisie or the English lower middle class, they had come by the early 1930s to embody much more than a mere social group: in German politics they stood for a set of values. Located between the two great antagonistic classes into which society had become divided, they represented people who stood on their own two feet, independent, hard-working, the healthy core of the German people, unjustly pushed to the side by the class war that was raging all about them. It was to people like these – small shopkeepers, skilled artisans running their own workshops, self-sufficient peasant farmers – that the Nazis had initially directed their appeal. The Nazi Party programme of 1920 was indeed among other things a typical product of the far-right politics of the German Mittelstand; the support of such people was among the factors that had got the Party off the ground in the first place.
Source: The Third Reich in Power
A reliable way to make people believe in...
A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But it was psychologists who discovered that you do not have to repeat the entire statement of a fact or idea to make it appear true. People who were repeatedly exposed to the phrase “the body temperature of a chicken” were more likely to accept as true the statement that “the body temperature of a chicken is 144°” (or any other arbitrary number). The familiarity of one phrase in the statement sufficed to make the whole statement feel familiar, and therefore true. If you cannot remember the source of a statement, and have no way to relate it to other things you know, you have no option but to go with the sense of cognitive ease.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
The general theme of these findings is that...
The general theme of these findings is that the idea of money primes individualism: a reluctance to be involved with others, to depend on others, or to accept demands from others. The psychologist who has done this remarkable research, Kathleen Vohs, has been laudably restrained in discussing the implications of her findings, leaving the task to her readers. Her experiments are profound—her findings suggest that living in a culture that surrounds us with reminders of money may shape our behavior and our attitudes in ways that we do not know about and of which we may not be proud. Some cultures provide frequent reminders of respect, others constantly remind their members of God, and some societies prime obedience by large images of the Dear Leader. Can there be any doubt that the ubiquitous portraits of the national leader in dictatorial societies not only convey the feeling that “Big Brother Is Watching” but also lead to an actual reduction in spontaneous thought and independent action?
Source: Thinking fast and slow
people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding...
people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. Imagine that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth. People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
Doctors said: “It is difficult to draw the...
Doctors said: “It is difficult to draw the line between shell-shock and blue funk. Both are physical as well as mental. Often it is the destruction of the nerve tissues by concussion, or actual physical damage to the brain; sometimes it is a shock of horror unbalancing the mind, but that is more rare. It is not generally the slight, nervous men who suffer worst from shell-shock. It is often the stolid fellow, one of those we describe as being utterly without nerves, who goes down badly. Something snaps in him. He has no resilience in his nervous system. He has never trained himself in nerve-control, being so stolid and self-reliant. Now, the nervous man, the cockney, for example, is always training himself in the control of his nerves, on ’buses which lurch round corners, in the traffic that bears down on him, in a thousand and one situations which demand self-control in a ‘nervy’ man. That helps him in war; whereas the yokel, or the sergeantmajor type, is splendid until the shock comes. Then he may crack. But there is no law. Imagination—apprehension—are the devil, too, and they go with ‘nerves.’”
Source: Now it can be told
Now that you have measured the lines, you—your...
Now that you have measured the lines, you—your System 2, the conscious being you call “I”—have a new belief: you know that the lines are equally long. If asked about their length, you will say what you know. But you still see the bottom line as longer. You have chosen to believe the measurement, but you cannot prevent System 1 from doing its thing; you cannot decide to see the lines as equal, although you know they are. To resist the illusion, there is only one thing you can do: you must learn to mistrust your impressions of the length of lines when fins are attached to them. To implement that rule, you must be able to recognize the illusory pattern and recall what you know about it. If you can do this, you will never again be fooled by the Müller-Lyer illusion. But you will still see one line as longer than the other.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
Then there were the methods Delbrück perfected of...
Then there were the methods Delbrück perfected of assaying, every few moments, the presence and number of free phage particles, by taking a measured sample from the broth of bacteria and phage and spreading it across a plate of nutrient jelly, where each virus starts a colony of bacterial destruction that multiplies so quickly that within a few hours it can be seen by the naked eye, as a bare spot in the bacterial lawn—called a plaque, d’Hérelle’s original term—to be counted and characterized for size, texture, outline.
Source: Eighth day of Creation
And, you say you have to know all...
James Watson in Eighth Day of Creation
And, you say you have to know all these facts—well, clearly the facts, some of them, that you learn are wrong, so if you take them too seriously you won’t discover the truth.
Source: Eighth Day of Creation
On the other hand, the anti-intellectualism of the...
On the other hand, the anti-intellectualism of the Nazi movement made sure that many senior figures in the Party, from Hitler down, ridiculed many of these ideas and thought them too abstruse to have any real political relevance. Neither Bernhard Rust nor Alfred Rosenberg, the two leading senior Nazis in the field of education and ideology, was politically skilled or determined enough to outmanoeuvre wily professors whose abilities to intrigue and dissemble had been honed in decades of in-fighting on university committees. The foundation of a new institute dedicated to the pursuit of a favourite obsession of the Nazis could be welcomed by conservative professors as a way of shunting off an unpopular colleague into an academic byway, as it was for example when the cantankerous far-right historian Martin Spahn was given his own Institute for Spatial Politics at the University of Cologne in 1934. This killed two birds with one stone, since it got Spahn out of the History Department, where he was deeply unpopular, into an area where he did not have to come into contact with his colleagues, and demonstrated at the same time the university’s commitment to the geopolitical ideas of the new regime.
Source: The Third Reich in Power
In short, two different types, one an R,...
In short, two different types, one an R, live but not virulent, and the other an S, virulent but killed. Many of the injected mice had died. In the heart’s blood of these mice, Griffith had found living, virulent pneumococci, of the S form—and not Type II but Type III. The change was permanent and inherited. Generations more of culturing had produced nothing but more Smooth, virulent Type III pneumonia germs. Other experiments produced similar transformations of other pneumococcal types. Griffith’s discovery suggested doubts about the existence of distinct true-breeding species among bacteria. It opened grave practical problems for epidemiologists and immunologists. It raised clouds of speculative and spurious explanations. All in all, microbiologists found transformation of bacteria about as unsettling as atomic physicists, at that same time, were finding the transmutation of elements by interaction with neutrons and protons.
Source: The eighth day of creation
Make no mistake: Defoe meant for Due Preparations...
Make no mistake: Defoe meant for Due Preparations to be a manual. It is didactic by design, and it is also a political intervention, advocating for preventive care as a matter of national importance. In distinguishing “preparations against the plague” from “preparations for the plague” and specifying that the former were preparations for the body, the latter for the soul, he emphasizes that such preparations are not just meant for times of plague. For Defoe, preparedness is a long-term, holistic project of self-management predicated on the idea that crisis is always “impending.” While almost always pursued belatedly because individuals tend to remain distracted by the trivialities of their daily lives, “put[ting] ourselves in a posture” of preparedness can at least defer, if only for a short while, suffering and regret. Defoe acknowledges that most English people will not prepare early enough, but even the awareness that actions can be taken in advance could make a difference for survival.
Link: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/epidemic/what-preparations-are-due
On 20 April 1935, a local paper, the...
On 20 April 1935, a local paper, the Schweinitz District News-Sheet (Schweinitzer Kreisblatt), printed a large photograph of Hitler on the front page in such a way that part of his head covered the letters ‘itzer’ in the title, leaving the letters ‘Schwein’, the German for ‘pig’, to provide what the Gestapo, who promptly banned the paper for three days, thought of as an insulting description of the Leader. It is unlikely that the offending layout was an accident.
Source: The Third Reich in Power
"The Double Helix is full of delights, high...
"The Double Helix is full of delights, high among them, for professional readers as well as laymen, the delight of demystifying science of its more pretentious claims to rationality and orderly procedure, the delight of revealing for once, or seeming to reveal, what scientists “really do”—which turns out to include coffee breaks and gossip. The result is a very beguiling version of the circumstances of Watson and Crick’s discovery. The book is irresistible to quote from, dangerous to lean on."
Source: Eighth day of creation
Discussing the discovery of DNA-B structure: "Then there...
Discussing the discovery of DNA-B structure: "Then there is the undeniable drama of how the discovery was made—a high comedy of intellect, and in action a full-blown thriller. To begin with, the discovery gathered in the threads of several lines of evidence and many experimental antecedents. Equally complex was the web of relationships among the scientists: in this net the purely intellectual details of the process of knowing are tangled inextricably. The discovery was made in a mood of artificially stimulated, frenzied competition. The competition was won by wit, insight, and luck rather than by thoroughness and hard work: victory for the grasshoppers over the ants, and the ants are resentful to this day."
Source: Eighth day of Creation
Ateshga’s world - shown beneath the map of...
Ateshga’s world - shown beneath the map of the galaxy - was an outrageous confection of a planet: a striped marshmallow giant with a necklace of sugary rings, combed and braided by the resonant forces of a dozen glazed and candied moons. We were crossing the ecliptic, so the rings were slowly tilting to a steeper angle, revealing more of their loveliness. There was no doubt that it was one of the most glorious worlds I had ever seen, and I had seen quite a few.
Source: House of Suns
Not just Hitler personally but also the Nazi...
Not just Hitler personally but also the Nazi movement in general had always held the letter of the law and the institutions of the state in contempt. From the very beginning, they had operated extra-legally, and this continued even after they had abandoned the idea of a direct putsch as the way to power. For the Nazis, the bullet and the ballot-box were complementary tools of power, not alternatives. Votes and elections were treated cynically as instruments of formal political legitimation; the will of the people was expressed not through the free articulation of public opinion, but through the person of Hitler and the Nazi movement’s incorporation of the historical destiny of the Germans, even if the Germans themselves disagreed with this. Moreover, widely accepted legal norms such as the notion that people should not commit murder or acts of violence, destruction and theft, were disregarded from the outset by the Nazis because they believed that history and the interests of the German (‘Aryan’) race justified extreme measures in the crisis that followed Germany’s defeat in the war.
Source: The Third Reich in Power
No longer is the science like that. Between...
No longer is the science like that. Between my two spells as Editor of Nature, in 1966–’73 and 1980–’95, the most striking change was the huge increase in competitiveness. In the old days, people would occasionally telephone to say they were sending a paper and to hope that we’d give it a fair wind; by 1980, authors would call to ask whether their manuscript had arrived, whether it had been sent to referees, why we had declined to publish it and why it was Nature’s consistent practice to rely on referees whose intelligence was below par, whose judgment had been warped by self-interest, whose charitable instincts had been blunted by cynicism and whose parentage must even be in doubt. My colleagues and I could never understand why authors did not appreciate an argument that seemed to us undeniable, that a top-class journal could remain so only by being selective. But these endless telephone conversations from 1980 onwards were a telling sign that good manners had ceased to matter.
Source: The Eighth Day of Creation
The past is complicated, and the people in...
The past is complicated, and the people in the past were complicated as well. I have frequently observed that the people who tell us not to impose present-day judgments on the past are unaware that many of these same judgments were made in the past as well.
During the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, train...
During the last quarter of the nineteenth-century, train travel was increasingly common but still risky, and accidents were not rare. Passengers injured in such accidents often demanded compensation from the railroad companies for their debilitating symptoms: back pain, trembling, exhaustion, numb extremities, headache, anxiety, insomnia, and memory defects. So common was this package of complaints that it became the basis of a new syndrome known as “railway spine” or (sometimes) “railway brain.”
Source: The Mind Fixers
To me, this mostly tracks with what 538...
To me, this mostly tracks with what 538 has said on record about how their model works and the design philosophy behind parts of it. To me, what Nate means when he says "directionally the right approach in terms of our model's takeaways" is that these sorts of wild and unintuitive outcomes are part of the point of the way the model is constructed.
Specifically, that when you get off into the weird situations like Trump winning Washington state, it's likely something incredibly weird has happened - something that likely has no historical precedent, so it may actually be a more sane thing to do to assume that now almost everything is backwards and Biden would win a bunch of states he shouldn't either.
To me, this points to a general willingness in the 538 model to just go "who knows" and build in some room for insane things to happen on the fringes. The Friday podcast episode about the 538 model specifically mentions that they have large/fat tails on their distribution that make it nearly impossible for someone to get over 95% chances of winning on a national level, and these sorts of wild results seem like the outcome of that. If you bake in an assumption that there's always a 5% chance of something crazy happening, that chance has to come from something in the data somewhere that reflects the ability of that to happen numerically, and thus will have numerical outcomes that seem impossible.
Source: HackerNews
When quietly walking along the shady pathways, and...
When quietly walking along the shady pathways, and admiring each successive view, I wished to find language to express my ideas. Epithet after epithet was found too weak to convey to those who have not visited the intertropical regions, the sensation of delight which the mind experiences. I have said that the plants in a hothouse fail to communicate a just idea of the vegetation, yet I must recur to it. The land is one great wild, untidy, luxuriant hothouse, made by Nature for herself, but taken possession of by man, who has studded it with gay houses and formal gardens. How great would be the desire in every admirer of nature to behold, if such were possible, the scenery of another planet! yet to every person in Europe, it may be truly said, that at the distance of only a few degrees from his native soil, the glories of another world are opened to him. In my last walk I stopped again and again to gaze on these beauties, and endeavoured to fix in my mind for ever, an impression which at the time I knew sooner or later must fail. The form of the orange-tree, the cocoa-nut, the palm, the mango, the tree-fern, the banana, will remain clear and separate; but the thousand beauties which unite these into one perfect scene must fade away: yet they will leave, like a tale heard in childhood, a picture full of indistinct, but most beautiful figures.
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
When we arrived at the head of the...
When we arrived at the head of the lagoon, we crossed a narrow islet, and found a great surf breaking on the windward coast. I can hardly explain the reason, but there is to my mind much grandeur in the view of the outer shores of these lagoon-islands. There is a simplicity in the barrier-like beach, the margin of green bushes and tall cocoa-nuts, the solid flat of dead coral-rock, strewed here and there with great loose fragments, and the line of furious breakers, all rounding away towards either hand. The ocean throwing its waters over the broad reef appears an invincible, all-powerful enemy; yet we see it resisted, and even conquered, by means which at first seem most weak and inefficient. It is not that the ocean spares the rock of coral; the great fragments scattered over the reef, and heaped on the beach, whence the tall cocoa-nut springs, plainly bespeak the unrelenting power of the waves. Nor are any periods of repose granted. The long swell caused by the gentle but steady action of the trade-wind, always blowing in one direction over a wide area, causes breakers, almost equalling in force those during a gale of wind in the temperate regions, and which never cease to rage. It is impossible to behold these waves without feeling a conviction that an island, though built of the hardest rock, let it be porphyry, granite, or quartz, would ultimately yield and be demolished by such an irresistible power. Yet these low, insignificant coral-islets stand and are victorious: for here another power, as an antagonist, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime, one by one, from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will that tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of the vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean which neither the art of man nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist.
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
Besides the several evident causes of destruction, there...
Besides the several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be some more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal. We may look to the wide extent of the Americas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the same result. Nor is it the white man alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children. Every one has heard of the inexplicable reduction of the population in the beautiful and healthy island of Tahiti since the date of Captain Cook’s voyages: although in that case we might have expected that it would have been increased; for infanticide, which formerly prevailed to so extraordinary a degree, has ceased; profligacy has greatly diminished, and the murderous wars become less frequent.
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
So I looked with fascination at those people...
So I looked with fascination at those people in their mobes, and tried to fathom what it would be like. Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Sæculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn’t always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to day, and the only drawback was that the world held his stories to be of small account. Perhaps that was why he felt such a compulsion to tell them, not just about his own exploits in the wilderness, but those of his mentors.
Source: Anathem
Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a...
Accustomed to look at maps drawn on a small scale, where dots, shading, and names are crowded together, we do not rightly judge how infinitely small the proportion of dry land is to water of this vast expanse. The meridian of the Antipodes has likewise been passed; and now every league, it made us happy to think, was one league nearer to England. These Antipodes call to one’s mind old recollections of childish doubt and wonder. Only the other day I looked forward to this airy barrier as a definite point in our voyage homewards; but now I find it, and all such resting-places for the imagination, are like shadows, which a man moving onwards cannot catch.
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever...
Systems 1 and 2 are both active whenever we are awake. System 1 runs automatically and System 2 is normally in a comfortable low-effort mode, in which only a fraction of its capacity is engaged. System 1 continuously generates suggestions for System 2: impressions, intuitions, intentions, and feelings. If endorsed by System 2, impressions and intuitions turn into beliefs, and impulses turn into voluntary actions. When all goes smoothly, which is most of the time, System 2 adopts the suggestions of System 1 with little or no modification. You generally believe your impressions and act on your desires, and that is fine—usually.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
Part 5 describes recent research that has introduced...
Part 5 describes recent research that has introduced a distinction between two selves, the experiencing self and the remembering self, which do not have the same interests. For example, we can expose people to two painful experiences. One of these experiences is strictly worse than the other, because it is longer. But the automatic formation of memories—a feature of System 1—has its rules, which we can exploit so that the worse episode leaves a better memory. When people later choose which episode to repeat, they are, naturally, guided by their remembering self and expose themselves (their experiencing self) to unnecessary pain. The distinction between two selves is applied to the measurement of well-being, where we find again that what makes the experiencing self happy is not quite the same as what satisfies the remembering self. How two selves within a single body can pursue happiness raises some difficult questions, both for individuals and for societies that view the well-being of the population as a policy objective.
Source: Thinking fast and slow
These men, excepting from accidents, are healthy, and...
Darwin speaking about miners called “apires”
These men, excepting from accidents, are healthy, and appear cheerful. Their bodies are not very muscular. They rarely eat meat once a week, and never oftener, and then only the hard dry charqui. Although with a knowledge that the labour was voluntary, it was nevertheless quite revolting to see the state in which they reached the mouth of the mine; their bodies bent forward, leaning with their arms on the steps, their legs bowed, their muscles quivering, the perspiration streaming from their faces over their breasts, their nostrils distended, the corners of their mouth forcibly drawn back, and the expulsion of their breath most laborious. Each time they draw their breath, they utter an articulate cry of “ay-ay,” which ends in a sound rising from deep in the chest, but shrill like the note of a fife. After staggering to the pile of ore, they emptied the “carpacho;” in two or three seconds recovering their breath, they wiped the sweat from their brows, and apparently quite fresh descended the mine again at a quick pace. This appears to me a wonderful instance of the amount of labour which habit, for it can be nothing else, will enable a man to endure.
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
The disjunction between scientific consensus and public opinion...
The disjunction between scientific consensus and public opinion on the topic of GMOs is disturbing, to say the least. I see it as partly a reflection of the breakdown in communication between scientists and the public at large. Already in my relatively short time working on CRISPR, I’ve discovered how challenging it can be to maintain a constructive, open dialogue between these two worlds—but also how necessary that kind of communication is for the advancement of scientific discoveries.
Source: A crack in creation, Jennifer Doudna
It is not possible for the mind to...
It is not possible for the mind to comprehend, except by a slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often, that the multiplier itself conveys an idea, not more definite than the savage implies when he points to the hairs of his head. As often as I have seen beds of mud, sand, and shingle, accumulated to the thickness of many thousand feet, I have felt inclined to exclaim that causes, such as the present rivers and the present beaches, could never have ground down and produced such masses. But, on the other hand, when listening to the rattling noise of these torrents, and calling to mind that whole races of animals have passed away from the face of the earth, and that during this whole period, night and day, these stones have gone rattling onwards in their course, I have thought to myself, can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste?
Source: Voyage of the Beagle
"In the real world, the right thing never...
"In the real world, the right thing never happens in the right place and the right time. It is the job of journalists and historians to make it appear that it has."
The first reported attempts came in the late...
The first reported attempts came in the late 1960s from Stanfield Rogers, an American physician who had been studying a wart-causing virus in rabbits, Shope papillomavirus. Rogers was particularly interested in one aspect of the Shope virus: It caused rabbits to overproduce arginase, an enzyme their bodies used to neutralize arginine, a harmful amino acid. The sick rabbits had much more arginase in their systems, and much less arginine, than healthy rabbits. What’s more, Rogers found that researchers who had worked with the virus also had lower-than-normal levels of arginine in their blood. Apparently these scientists had contracted the infections from the rabbits, and these infections had led to lasting changes in the researchers’ bodies as well.
Source: A crack in creation
Because much of what ecologists do is cheap...
Because much of what ecologists do is cheap and as likely to involve a bucket of mud as a fancy machine, to ecologists a lab is often a group of people who might share some physical space but who more often have fanned out across the world. My lab is a group of brains connected by a common set of quests. My lab is a group of people dedicated to beautiful new discoveries and to engaging the public in those discoveries.
Source: never home alone
the biodiversity of your body and home is,...
the biodiversity of your body and home is, indeed, a kind of record of your life, much as the bacteria on the bakers’ hands are a measure of how much time they spend baking. I’ll note here that once the bakers found out that some among them had hands covered in starter bacteria, each one wanted to know who had the most. Who, among them, had lived the life most fully submerged in bread?
Source: never home alone
Australianisms appeared in Kendall’s poetry—he called the dingo...
Australianisms appeared in Kendall’s poetry—he called the dingo the warragul, a common coastal usage at the time. The kookaburra he called ‘the settlers’ clock’. He was particularly annoyed by the non-Currency belief that Australian birds had no song. The magpie certainly did, and the bellbird, and with colonial pride he pushed them in his writing. He possessed a sense of care for nature—he complained that the loss of many native species of birds was due to the extinction of Aboriginal hunters in many areas, which had led to a glut in the population of the huge lizard named the goanna, an eating delicacy which the Aboriginals had kept in check.
Source: Australians vol i
The freed Canadians were impressed as other visitors...
The freed Canadians were impressed as other visitors were, by the amount of drinking in the colony, particularly Lepailleur. Mrs Stone, the wife of one of his employers, was a pretty woman but she drank as much as a man, and was rapidly becoming deranged and dishevelled. Hippolite Lactôt found ‘Intemperance was de rigueur; sobriety the exception, amongst women as it was for men.’ Once a woman convict, intoxicated and just released from the Female Factory, stood in the middle of Parramatta Road screaming drunken curses outside the house of another ex-convict woman. When a Patriote sent a police guard to protect her, she turned her back, ‘lifted up her clothes and showed . . . her bum, saying that she had a “black hole” and slapping her belly like the wretch she was’. The Canadians were utterly unaccustomed to such drunkenness and displays of crudeness in women.
Source: Australians vol i