Linkage brought to you by: "A friday in my newsreader: Febuary 22." Also by the letter 'A'.
Occasionally, so many wonderful posts appear in the lull between the Thursday doldrums and the Friday excitation (pun much?) that I have to “link it up…er…mott”.
- It turns out that you can see the effects of trawling for fish from space. Do we need any more evidence against it?
- Uncertain Principles posts about the backlash from the Virginia Tech shootings: turns out stage plays with fake wooden weapons endanger students…according to some college administrators.
- Uncertain principles also wonders if there is any realistic nanotechnology in SciFi writing.
- That encrypted hard drive you might have? Worthless now that the encryption can be broken…easily.
Oh and as a side note, anyone else watch one of my favorite video blogs: http://tv.winelibrary.com/?
image credit: Pulpolux !!!
Not only is it going to be a total eclipse…
But most of the U.S.A. has good – great viewing weather.
Sucks for all of you in the blue and purple.
Now if you will excuse me, the light from the computer screen is obscuring my view of the moon.
The power of the individual: The American Enlightenment and Romanticism
During the 18th century, scientific and social changes reshaped the concept of the self. The individual slowly separated from the collective and began to develop as an antithesis of the collective agrarian society of prior centuries; thus, giving rise to a wave of new philosophical thought that evolved into the popular movement of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment developed around the belief that scientific thought and expression should be free from religious interference and that the foundations of society should be human reason and logic. Over time, these ideals gave rise to Romanticism which introduced the contrast of nature and the self, the internal desires, feelings and beliefs, and juxtaposed Nature with science. Franklin, Poe and Thoreau each represent one of the three popular faces of Enlightenment and Romanticism: Franklin, a well-respected Enlightenment writer, focused his writings on the improvement of the social order through improvement of the self and the realization of a deistic world; Thoreau, an Emersonian or “bright” Romantic, merged Nature with science and allowed for both to work simultaneously while emphasizing the individual’s ability to remove themselves from the flow of society; Poe, a “dark” romantic, wrote mainly on the way the individual views his world and the way the nature of the mind can recreate the world.
The giant crystals in the following slide-show were revealed when water was pumped out of a Mexican mine. The slide-show will explain everything else.
How can you beat a line like: The good news is we understand a lot about the universe; the bad news is it makes no sense.
I used the mysterious beauty of dark matter and dark energy as an excuse to make some didactic points about science and rationality and politics. (If I weren’t an atheist, I would have made a good preacher.)
hat tip: cosmicvariance
The Pale Blue Dot and the Human Condition.
In February of 1990, Voyager 1 turned away from its primary mission and took a picture of the Earth from a distance of 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles.) This picture featured the earth as a single small dot. A crumb on the surface of space, just lucky enough to rest inside one of many sunbeams many times its size. It demonstrated, graphically and irrefutably, what many people had believed for centuries: the earth is not special, and petty human conflicts were less important to the universe than an single ant’s life is to the earth.
Carl Sagan believed this wholeheartedly and this image inspired his book Pale Blue Dot. In response to this image he made the speech that is presented in the video in the next section. This video overlays Carl Sagan’s thoughts with images from movies that most people believe to represent themselves and their history. The power of the words combined with the visuals is stunning and well worth your time.
