Tag: Grand Blueprint
-
Nature’s ledger
Thinking again about the peculiar self-liquidating scrip. A city issued the scrip with a series of boxes or punch locations. Each time the scrip changed hands, a new hole was punched and a small tax was paid to the issuer. When all the holes were punched, the scrip was simply discarded. It had served its…
-
Great line
Denyse at MindMatters turns out a couple of classic lines! But an overarching theme has been the need to promote the idea of a gradual development of human-like intelligence. As it happens, ancestors way stupider than their descendants are just not what paleontologists have been digging up. And histories that are made up rather than…
-
Ford is nature
Assembly-line work is supposedly an unnatural invention. In fact it’s far more natural than artisanal craftsmanship. Every cell includes dozens of factories, each turning out repetitive proteins and neurotransmitters. Our cerebellum is a library of repetitive routines. When deprived of daily assembly-line work, humans still need to run an assembly line. We see the result…
-
Wonderful concept
In this podcast Eric Anderson brings in a powerful concept, but he discusses it from an angle that seems unproductive to my tastes. His approach must be persuasive to some types of scientists, but it doesn’t hit the mark for my engineerish mindset. The concept: When organisms change over time, they’re not Innovatively Disrupting. They’re…
-
Using motion as a sense
This is fascinating! Nematodes charge their bodies to jump by repulsion. They seem to use a bee’s self-created charge as an attraction in the other direction! = = = = = START QUOTE: When some nematode species jump, they tend to bend their body and change their posture before take-off, but C. elegans worms stand…
-
The anti-lab organ?
Evolution News highlights a recently discovered organelle inside cells. A vault is found in nearly all cells, free-living and part of complex animals. Its function is unclear at the moment. Like most recent discoveries, it didn’t require an electron microscope or MRI; it’s visible with a good optical microscope but nobody noticed it before. The…
-
Palate cleanser…
I’m barnstorming the semifinal install and check of all courseware modules, mixing new ones, reprocessed old ones, and unprocessed old ones. As I run through each lesson, I’m reminded again of the remarkable engineering in our anatomy. Time for a break. Here’s a piece of engineering in the palate and pharynx. For orientation, this picture…
-
Delia’s gone, one more round
Sam Kahn writes in New Atlantis about Delia Bacon, a forgotten figure who was at the center of the American creative burst in the 1840s. She was taught by Beecher and influenced Emerson and Hawthorne and Poe. She wasn’t related to Francis Bacon, but spent her life trying to establish that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s work…
-
God believes in ether
Until 1920 most discussion of electricity and radio was based on the assumption of an ether. Michelson-Morley DIDN’T wipe out the ether. It was wiped much later when quantum quackery took over the doctrines and creeds of “science”. Here’s a nice clear example from a 1904 book by Frederick Vreeland, the inventor of the weirdly…
-
Secret vectors
This got me thinking about the bee’s waggle dance and vector vs cartesian orientation. Our eyes can do cartesian, but most of our senses, including basic orientation via the eyes, are vector. Looking through PNAS, found a new bit of bee research that goes way beyond this question. The researchers placed an artificial feeder in…
-
If humans had been blind 2
Following on theme of previous item…. If humans had been blind, we would have no concept of 2 dimensions. The tactile world is 3d. The audio world has 4 dimensions: time, frequency, intensity, and location. The olfactory world probably can’t be dimensionalized at all. Only the retina traps the world in flat 2d. Recording and…
-
Waggle
Kirn cites this short clip of Tom Wolfe interviewing McLuhan. They’re discussing the value of turning off mass media, which is unquestionable and unsurprising. I’ve been doing it for many years. McLuhan says that all mass media is intentionally wrong, which is also unquestionable and unsurprising. Insiders have been telling us occasionally for centuries. If…
-
If humans had been blind…
This old book reviews early efforts at printing in tactile form. Braille is the most obvious, but intaglio engraving is also 3dish, and carved letters like runes were 3d. If humans had been blind, we would have no concept of 2 dimensions. The tactile world is 3d. The audio world has 4 dimensions: time, frequency,…
-
HGT puzzle solved
My pet theory is that humans are a hybrid of bird and mammal. Which type of bird transferred the genes for politicians? The cassowary is commonly acknowledged as the world’s most dangerous bird, particularly to humans byu/solateor ininterestingasfuck Result:
-
Close but no pierogi.
Via UncommonDescent, a new hypothesis about human intelligence is generally wiser and more ‘non-partisan’ than the usual Darwin crap. The article acknowledges that brain size is not the major variable, but still clings to the energy-consumption model. The discovery of fire made us smarter because cooked food is easier to digest. First, easier digestion DOES…
Polistra's Mill 