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Member (Idle past 1405 days) Posts: 20714 From: the other end of the sidewalk Joined: |
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Author | Topic: Cosmos with Neil DeGrass Tyson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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hooah writes: Add some LSD and see if you get the same effect that Wizard of Oz supposedly has. I am sure some Feynman lectures work this way. Everything works that way. "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Just a reminder...
quote: ...and how odd to be reminded (in the 4/7 NYT interview with Shubin) that Sagan was denied membership in the National Academy of Sciences. "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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Thanks for the link--I just finished watching.
I thought it was excellent. The combo of intellectual adventure and field work in a challenging environment was great--using digital effects to turn the tilted strata back into a flood plain was esp. nice.
Wow, two good shows on science ... must be the end of times Eh, end times, beginning times...same-same. "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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RAZD writes: wizardry/haroldry Harold, are you messin' with those witches again? You get your young ass home right now! --Maude"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
I haven't seen the second installment yet...
But even very good scientists slip into teleological shorthand explanations; for example, making it sound as though a need for a bigger brain caused it to evolve, rather than more carefully explaining that an environment which conferred survival advantages on a larger, more efficient information-processing brain created selection pressures which favored mammals with that trait.
ProtoTypical writes: Is that right? If I do lots of calculus will my children have bigger brains? Bigger than what? "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
Prototypical writes: It seems likely that there would be some driver that was causing the sustained incremental increases. Other people. "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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RAZD writes: Not just in size but in convolutions. Primates and squirrels apparently have more developed sense of 3-D world due to leaping from branch to branch. Proto could grow his kids' brains by teaching them another language after the age of first language acquisition but before puberty; that'll convolute them, too Safer than trees, though I'd personally prefer the trees. Learning another language is like taking another lover: Who's got the time? I like Shubin's enthusiastic but matter-of-fact affect: he's just laying out his portrait of our evolutionary past, sketching some of the best evidence. I especially like his inclusion of regular people with relevance to the topic: he explains polydactyly to parents and how our embryonic testes drop and fishes' don't to a fishmonger. Tyson is a bit more...incisive, albeit coolly and urbanely. Throughout the series he's noted suppression of the best science of the day for political and religious reasons. The Patterson story added the hydra of corporate money. The scope of Cosmos gives Tyson a bigger canvas, and I think he's using it well. Of course, he's an intellectually and culturally confident black man, and that will strike many Americans as arrogance. Shubin is cozier. It's great to have them both doing this work. We need more, much more: funny to think that CGI and advances in scientific and popular imaging on all scales might reignite public enthusiasm for science, as they offer visually stunning explanations that let people see what they cannot imagine. Incredulity arguments lose their punch when you've seen it on tv. (More mundanely, I think many people don't know the persuasive power of the fossil record because they simply haven't seen enough of it. My prescription for both better tv and better intellectual times is show and tell more fossils.) Thanks for the reminder. I haven't watched the Inner Monkey yet, although I feel perfectly comfortable with mine. Perfect for a rainy Saturday. Edited by Omnivorous, : No reason given."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3 |
RAZD writes: Then there is astronomy with their fantasy about light years and development of stars with the original stars blowing up to make new stars like the sun and the planets like the earth You know, I was just wondering about that. If you believe that the earth is 6000 years old, what do you make of the stars and the apparent age of the universe? Do you insist that nothing in the universe is farther away than 6000 light years? How do you explain stars whose life cycle status shows them to be clearly older than ours? When God created the earth, were we joining a show already in progress? Or did God create the magnificent evidence of the universe's size and age just to keep us guessing? I think: head, sand; sand, head. When you write young earth claims broadly across the night sky, they look even more absurd. After all, we're seeing that light now--no historical conjuring or speculation involved."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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onifre writes: It's even a wonder how murders get solved with all those theories and fantasies and guesswork about the unobserved death of a person, eh? And an awful lot of false convictions are based on eyewitness testimony, which is infamously unreliable. So much for the sharp science of right here and now. Still, killers have good odds if they think location:
quote: Well, sure, Denver and San Diego--buncha amateurs. I thought better of Philly.
Story here The story links to the Scripps Howard database, in case you want to sort your paranoia or odds of apprehension by race or ethnicity."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member Posts: 3978 From: Adirondackia Joined: Member Rating: 7.3
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RAZD writes: Again very well done and I am sad that this will be ending. I did watch Inner Monkey and thought it was the best yet. I especially enjoyed "meeting" Johanson and White, whose work I've long admired. I suspect we'll see more of Shubin."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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