Links for 2010-08-20

In honor of the upcoming completion of Neptune's first full orbit since its discovery, a discussion of how it was found.

"I'm actually quite surprised there isn't something like this out there already. A few web searches I did unearthed one article in Reader's Digest that did put together three such albums out of the early '70s material, but then stopped. But why stop at three? I'm going to go through 13, yes, 13 albums the would-have-been Beatles may have released since 1970. "

"I think that we're in the worst stage of knowledge about disease and the human body. We have enough tools to get partway into the details, but not enough to see our way through to real understanding. Earlier ages were ignorant, and (for the most part) they knew it. (Lewis Thomas's The Youngest Science has a good section on medicine as his own father practiced it - he was completely honest about how little he could do for most of his patients and how much he depended on placebos, time, and hope). Now, thanks to advances in molecular and cell biology, we've begun to open a lot of locked boxes, only to find inside them. . .more locked boxes. (Sorry about all these links. For some reason literature is running away with me this morning). We get excited (justifiably!) at learning things that we never knew, uncovering systems that we never suspected, but we've been guilty (everyone) of sometimes thinking that the real, final answers must be in view. They aren't, not yet."

"The most important question we can ask of historians is "Why are some periods and places so astonishingly more productive than the rest?" It is intellectually embarrassing that this is almost never posed squarely -- I can think of only two articles (Gray, 1958 and 1961) and two books (Kroeber, 1944 and McClelland, 1961) that tackle this directly. But Gray is a lunatic, Kroeber waffles vaguely, and McClelland veers off into a fascinating but incomplete assessment. The question has never been the focus of professional attention in social history, although its answer would have thrilling implications for education, politics, science and art. "

"The authors of this paper use characters from the 1998 film The Big Lebowski to illustrate the intricate, self-defined nature of information seeking behavior and the ways in which personal characteristics contribute to the success or failure of an information search."