Tag: science
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Look gravity in the eye
The way we look along the the flat of the land is very boring. Flatland. Apart from its not flat its ever so slightly curved so we’re not even looking at it straight. Lie down flat on the ground in a wood or forest and stare directly up. Now you’re facing gravity. Now you’re properly…
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The Dry Salvages – T. S. Eliot
(PDF Download) (The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks,with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.Salvages is pronounced to rhyme with assuages.Groaner: a whistling buoy.) I I do not know much about gods; but I think that the riverIs a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,Patient to some degree,…
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Our time
This is kind of inspired by Roger Penrose’s thoughts on the Universe. Time goes like: And you’re sat there thinking about whether to have a Big Mac or a Filet O Fish. How can you grasp the length of time that has passed until you came on the scene? How can you grasp the length…
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I’ll be back
A possible explanation for re-incarnation, but not how it’s explained in current religions. Once you die time has no meaning. Like going to sleep. In the same way you had no concept of how much time passed until you ended up in the body you are now. How long did those last 13+ billion years…
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Spirit of the teacher
Carrying on from Scientific observers, shepherds and messiahs, here’s Maria Montessori’s take: But let us seek to implement in the soul the self-sacrificing spirit of the scientist with the reverent love of the disciple of Christ, and we shall have prepared the spirit of the teacher. – The Montessori Method, p13, Maria Montessori Teaching is where…
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Keep It Simple
Occam’s razor (from FOLDOC). The English philosopher, William of Occam (1300-1349) propounded Occam’s Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. (Latin for “Entities should not be multiplied more than necessary”). That is, the fewer assumptions an explanation of a phenomenon depends on, the better it is. Or simple is better than complex. But also it’s…
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100 million years
I like to think about time, especially how short-sighted we are. It took “only” 100 or so million years to create life on earth (from Lex Fridman vs Andrej Karpathy @13:26). Reading about How fast is gravity, the Neutron Star collision that enabled us to detect the speed of graviational waves a few years ago was 130…
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Sea of thermodynamics
Reading about Ernest Shackleton stuck in a boat (the James Caird)… … the struggle against the sea is an act of physical combat, and there is no escape. It is a battle against a tireless enemy in which men never actually wins; the most that he can hope for is not to be defeated. —…
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The Kingdom of Delusion is Within You
I’ve been reading Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God is Within You alongside Dawkins’ The God Delusion. I agree with almost all that Dawkins has to say, yet in my eyes he says it without any of the grace or weight or feeling of Tolstoy. They’re both attacking the church, but Dawkins chooses to attack all…
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The Word of Gervais
I was pointing out something Ricky Gervais said to a Muslim friend of mine. “You see if we take something like fiction and any holy book, and any other fiction, and destroyed it, okay. In 1000 years’ time that wouldn’t come back just as it is. Whereas if we took every science book and every…
Ian's Philosophy 