thescian
Posts by this author
The final paragraphs.
My habits are methodical, and this has been of not a little use for my particular line of work. Lastly, I have had ample leisure from not having to earn my own bread. Even ill-health, though it has annihilated several years of my life, has saved me from the distractions of…
Darwin at his best--always questioning the very foundations.
With respect to immortality,1 nothing shows me how strong and almost instinctive a belief it is, as the consideration of the view now held by most physicists, namely that the sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life,…
Succinct and spot-on. This is Darwin speculating that he thinks the prevalent feeling of the world is happiness rather than pain.
Some writers indeed are so much impressed with the amount of suffering in the world, that they doubt if we look to all sentient beings, whether there is more of misery…
CCTV in Birmingham.
CCTV does not justify its use and cost,in most cases. The money spent on unnecessary CCTV costs twice--the money lost and opportunity lost to spend the money on better training and better recruitment.
This was the time when Darwin was studying for his B.A at Cambridge.
But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them and rarely compared their external…
to my mind there are no advantages and many disadvantages in lectures compared with reading. Dr. Duncan's lectures on Materia Medica at 8 o'clock on a winter's morning are something fearful to remember. Dr. Munro made his lectures on human anatomy as dull, as he was himself, and the subject…
Lessig's TEDxBoston talk (this is not organized by TED, but by other people in TED spirit, hence TEDx).
I'll keep quoting as I read through. Don't want to add anything myself and sully the experience of reading Darwin.
I have heard my father and elder sisters say that I had, as a very young boy, a strong taste for long solitary walks; but what I thought about I know not. I often became quite absorbed…
If you don't know her, google and learn. Completely agree with her assessment of the near irrelevance of Social Media if you aren't focussing on the important things in life.
Here's the NASA briefing. And a video:
Saw a couple of news sites deciding to headline this variously as: Sun unleashes stuff on earth, Sun declares war on earth (ok, I made that up), etc. If these headlines are indications of our self-importance, then we can surmise that the work of Copernicus,…
What's he doing in the 21st century? Well, the same thing of course, only with a more contemporary vocabulary. Michael Shermer on Deepak Chopra's "quantum flapdoodle"
over here.
This is around 1817 when he is around 8 or 9 years old:
By the time I went to this day-school my taste for natural history, and more especially for collecting, was well developed. I tried to make out the names of plants, and collected all sorts of things, shells, seals, franks, coins,…
Natural organisms never had anything like source code. The genetic
code of an organism is more comparable to a binary (in fact,
quaternary) executable. Imagine a C compiler made by patching the
binary of hello.c a billion times in a genetic algorithm and you'll
see how hard this is to understand. -…
India's Aakanksha Sarda, 18 year old from Bombay.
An economist article on the unjust justice system in USA.
Here's a case ACLU is defending: Sixteen Years in Prison for Videotaping the Police? A Slashdot comment with some rather painful statistics.
Isn't this something that Alexis de Tocqueville saw a long time ago? Tocqueville was a snob, one…
Genius penetrates this world well and a humbled genius penetrates even better. Professor Jim Al-Khalili programme on BBC4 "Science and Islam" was an eye-opener for me, especially the details of the life of ibn al-Haytham, a medieval genius. The opening sentence of this post alludes to the fact…
There are simulations and then there are simulations. This video is all over the intertubes. A simulation rendered by the Lagoa Multiphysics engine developed by Thiago Costa (works for Ubisoft).
Hitchens in Slate:
A hereditary head of state, as Thomas Paine so crisply phrased it, is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary physician or a hereditary astronomer. To this innate absurdity, Prince Charles manages to bring fatuities that are entirely his own.
A court in Russia has convicted two people for offending religion. So, I ask the same question that Richard Dawkins and others have been asking for a while: What exactly is special about religion that it requires unquestioning respect? Why can't we criticise god for asking us to keep women as…
STUDSAT - Satellite designed by Indian students to be launched on Monday.
A powerful and deeply shocking artistic rendition by Isao Hashimoto. From here.
The perverse Danse Macabre of our own times. When we see human folly rendered on a compressed historical canvas, it is all the more clear how precarious our personal survival is. Nidhi, my 3 year old daughter, saw me…
Prayer, according to Martha, a clever girl, and therefore not a believer. From Julian Barnes novel "England, England":
Alfalfa, who farts in Devon,
Bellowed be thy name.
Thy wigwam come.
Thy swill be scum
In Bath, which is near the Severn.
Give us this day our sandwich spread,
And give us our bus-…
Admirable restraint from a 16-year old. The policemen involved in the incident have no clue about their own guidance? A mighty stink must be raised.
An interesting article at WSJ by Brian Caplan of Econlog that weighs the various aspects of having children.
So, the Archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church wants "the monopoly of Darwinism and the deceptive idea that science in general contradicts religion" to end, just as his friends in the US. [New Scientist blog]
This is like saying we can't let cleverness have a monopoly, stupidity must have an…
Bhopal.
The recent court verdict is a horrid reflection on the fundamental indecency of humanity. 7000 dead and 25 years later a verdict that is all but a fucking whitewash, thanks to Union Carbide, a US company. American tragedies sink the hearts of everyone everywhere. Their president knows…