600 million years ago, in the Burgess Shale fossils of Canada, one can see dramatic changes happening in evolution. Life is exploding in form and diversity. Nature is experimenting wildly, with body shapes, body parts, eyes, and heads, fossils that look like Pixar animation. We aren’t sure why, but at that time, animals started eating other animals […]
Isaac Newton got the concepts right, perhaps better than anyone else in history. Mass is quantity of matter. Momentum is quantity of motion. Force is change in motion. Change of motion is acceleration. Mass is resistance to force. Force equals mass times acceleration. F=ma This equation “is the basis of our mechanical, civil, hydraulic, acoustic, […]
A fish won’t stare at you, but an octopus will. They watch you, with their human-like camera eyes, as much as you watch them. They are the smartest animal that has stayed in the sea, the only invertebrate – animals with no backbone – with a large brain. Though as primitive as shell fish, […]
“All humans of normal intelligence can learn any language, provided they start at a young age. After the age of five or six, a child can almost never become perfectly fluent in a language, and the ability to learn it can completely disappear soon after that. After puberty, it is almost impossible to perfect the […]
“How is it possible that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?” Albert Einstein. In 1939, at Cambridge University, Ludwig Wittgenstein was lecturing on the Philosophy of Mathematics. By this time, with messianic certainty, he was adamant that mathematics was just a lot […]
“What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.” St. Augustine of Hippo. Everywhere in archeology, in the pyramids of Giza, the stones of Stonehenge, the observatory of Chichen Itza, or the temples of Angkor Was, […]
There is singing, and then there is singing. Bob Dylan does singing. Listen to ‘House of the rising Sun’, on his very first album. Malcolm Gladwell speaks of innovators, people who are always different. They wear odd clothes, and in ways that others don’t and wouldn’t. They start fads, but they don’t follow them. They […]
“The evidence does cast enormous suspicion on Oswald. . . . leave him looking guilty of something. The evidence does not, on the other hand, put him behind a gun in the sixth-floor window.” Anthony Summers At 11:45 am, Oswald’s co-workers on the sixth floor took the elevator down for lunch and to see the […]
“After all, he seems to have a lot to say about what can’t be said.” Bertrand Russell. Ludwig Wittgenstein came from a very wealthy family of Vienna, in the time before WW I, a family of musicians, professors, and suicides. He went to the same grammar school as Adolf Hitler. His sister was painted by […]
“I don’t really know what the interior of anybody else is like – I often feel very fragmented, and as if I have a symphony of different voices, and voice overs, and factoids, going on all the time, and digressions on digressions…” David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace was always Meta-thinking – thinking about […]
