Links for 2009-7-27

"[Chabon asks] a valid question, but I can't escape the feeling that it reflects a particularly American idealization of childhood. Growing up slowly is a privilege of wealth, and few children throughout human history have enjoyed a childhood without the privations of hunger, war, or grinding poverty. "

"The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there. A very grave, very significant shift in our idea of childhood has occurred since then. The Wilderness of Childhood is gone; the days of adventure are past. The land ruled by children, to which a kid might exile himself for at least some portion of every day from the neighboring kingdom of adulthood, has in large part been taken over, co-opted, colonized, and finally absorbed by the neighbors."

"Every popular explanation of particle physics is liberally illustrated with cartoon-like pictures of straight and wiggly lines representing electrons, photons, and quarks, interacting with one another. These so-called Feynman diagrams were introduced by Richard Feynman in the Physical Review in 1949, and they quickly became an essential tool for particle physicists. Early on, Feynman struggled to explain the meaning of the diagrams to his fellow physicists. But using them, he came up with easy answers to difficult problems in quantum mechanics and ultimately won a share of the Nobel Prize. "

The assertion that "academic research contributes little to overall economic innovation and growth" would be more interesting if I believed that economist had meaningful measures of innovation and growth.

"Part of what makes the Earth such a nice place to live, the story goes, is that Jupiter's overbearing gravity acts as a gravitational shield deflecting incoming space junk, mainly comets, away from the inner solar system where it could do for us what an asteroid apparently did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Indeed, astronomers look for similar configurations -- a giant outer planet with room for smaller planets in closer to the home stars -- in other planetary systems as an indication of their hospitableness to life."

"This book consists of ideas, images, & quotations hastily stored locally and in duplicate in the Operator Forward Command Base for possible use in stories, novels, and after action reports. For the most part they are merely suggestions or random impressions designed to set the memory or imagination working. Their sources are various - dreams, things read, casual incidents, 3x video, FLIR, synthetic aperture radar, absinthe visions, etc."