Links for 2011-05-14

""Craft" today is not a counter to the Romantic vision of an artistic elite chosen by the Divine, it is a quasi-proletarian flinch often designed to protect one's work from being compared to art, thus protecting it (and one's ego) from its near-inevitable failure to stack up to the idea of art as a superlative. The craft metaphor also serves the production-driven processes of conglomerate publishing: books are published to fill slots and develop and extend categories on a mass scale, which militates against the individual nature of a piece of art. And yet, writers, as small businesspeople, also hope to avoid complete proletarianization (even when they write work-for-hire material to specifics as stringent as anything one might find in a fast food joint) and thus don't dare embrace the industrial metaphor their masters long ago did. So they declare themselves to be craftspeople, a head higher than the cloth hats that used to read their stuff before everyone got television sets."

"In a developing world city, the schools and hospitals tend to be far better than what's available in rural areas. Even with high rates of unemployment, the economic opportunities in cities vastly outpace what's available in rural areas. But there's a more basic reason - cities are exciting. They offer options: where to go, what to do, what to see. It's easy to dismiss this idea - that people would move to cities to avoid rural boredom - as trivial. It's not. As Amartya Sen argued in his seminal book, "Development as Freedom", people don't just want to be less poor, they want more opportunities, more freedoms. Cities promise options and opportunities, and they often deliver.

What's harder to understand, for me, at least, is why anyone would have moved to London in the years from 1500 - 1800, the years in which it experienced rapid, continuous growth and became the greatest metropolis of the 19th century."

Hydrogen and helium are obviously common. Oxygen and then carbon are the next two most abundant elements. Way more abundant than beryllium and boron even though Be and B have fewer protons than either oxygen or carbon. Oh, one more note - this chart shows the relative abundance of elements in the Milky Way, not the universe - but you get the idea.

Why is there so much carbon? I guess maybe we should start from the beginning.

"The best stories in the history of physics are those in which someone comes from humble origins and, seemingly out of nowhere, makes a brilliant discovery that changes everything.  Such stories, however, can give a very misleading impression of the nature of scientific progress: science is a continuous process, and a closer inspection of any incredible breakthrough always reveals that there were numerous earlier discoveries that anticipated it.

A great case study of this is Einstein's special theory of relativity, introduced in 1905.  Einstein's groundbreaking work transformed mankind's perceptions of space and time, provided answers to puzzling problems and led directly to other major discoveries, including the harnessing of nuclear energy.  However, Einstein's revelations were preceded by some twenty years of gradual progress, during which time researchers put forth tantalizing hypotheses that came closer and closer to the truth."