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HuckleB
HuckleB's Journal
HuckleB's Journal
June 21, 2016
"Poetry and science seem like opposites – but the two have long been intertwined. At London's Roundhouse in June, performance poet Robin Lamboll's take was wonderfully dramatic. It featured a shouting, angry and judging voice performance on "science being fun facts of the natural world and religion being Nietzsche's The Antichrist".
Watching it made me think about the flirtation of poetry and science and how deep a romance it is. In the late 1700s, scientific treatises were written in poetic form because poetry was considered the language of intellect and the future. In the 1800s, Lewis Carroll experimented with mathematical logic to create The Square Stanza.
And who can forget Dante's The Divine Comedy; a smorgasbord of history and religion which at its damning best was underpinned by solid science such as the action of gravity as he travels to the core of the earth and on Lucifer's fall through the galaxy.
In 1984, the paper The Detection of Shocked Co/Emission by physicist J. W. V. Storey was published in The Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia as a 38-stanza poem, much to the irritation of his colleagues (and his sadistic pleasure).
Poetry in the DNA
Today, many poets embrace and explore both the confirmed and the working theories of physics, astronomy and nature, the most popular scientific fields for poets. The idea of scientists as poets is surprisingly common; a variation of the "writer with the day job".
..."
-------------------------------------------
Yes, a good read.
Or so I think.
The love affair between science and poetry
http://www.afr.com/lifestyle/arts-and-entertainment/books/the-love-affair-between-science-and-poetry-20160613-gphvt1"Poetry and science seem like opposites – but the two have long been intertwined. At London's Roundhouse in June, performance poet Robin Lamboll's take was wonderfully dramatic. It featured a shouting, angry and judging voice performance on "science being fun facts of the natural world and religion being Nietzsche's The Antichrist".
Watching it made me think about the flirtation of poetry and science and how deep a romance it is. In the late 1700s, scientific treatises were written in poetic form because poetry was considered the language of intellect and the future. In the 1800s, Lewis Carroll experimented with mathematical logic to create The Square Stanza.
And who can forget Dante's The Divine Comedy; a smorgasbord of history and religion which at its damning best was underpinned by solid science such as the action of gravity as he travels to the core of the earth and on Lucifer's fall through the galaxy.
In 1984, the paper The Detection of Shocked Co/Emission by physicist J. W. V. Storey was published in The Proceedings of the Astronomical Society of Australia as a 38-stanza poem, much to the irritation of his colleagues (and his sadistic pleasure).
Poetry in the DNA
Today, many poets embrace and explore both the confirmed and the working theories of physics, astronomy and nature, the most popular scientific fields for poets. The idea of scientists as poets is surprisingly common; a variation of the "writer with the day job".
..."
-------------------------------------------
Yes, a good read.
Or so I think.
June 21, 2016
"...
But don’t worry, this just means you have to think a little harder about how likely things are. David Hand writes about this in his 2014 book: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. This is making the rounds again in the media because of the recent “rare” astronomical events.
Yesterday the Summer Solstice coincided with the Strawberry Moon – the first full moon in June. The last time this happened was in 1967. Recently we have seen “rare” transits of Mercury and Venus across the sun.
These events are not that rare, and I really don’t see what the fuss is all about (I guess the media is desperate for anything they can hype.) Don’t get me wrong, I love astronomical events, it is their rarity that I think is overhyped.
...
First it is important to recognize that when you have lots of opportunities for unlikely things to happen, they are bound to happen by chance. As I like to say, in New York City, which has a population of over 8 million people, a 1 in 8 million coincidence should happen every day.
..."
----------------------------------
A good read by Dr. Novella. Of course, Tim Minchin cuts to the chase:
"A woman had given birth to naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls, which is very rare. And she said, "The doctors told me there was a one in 64 million chance that this could happen. It's A MIRACLE!" But, of course, we know it's not, because things that have a one in 64 million chance happen ... ALL the TIME! To presume that your one in 64 million chance thing is a miracle, is to significantly underestimate the total number of things that THERE ARE. ... Maths."
-Tim Minchin
The Improbability Principle (Or things that have a one in 64 million chance happen... ALL the TIME!)
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-improbability-principle/#more-9157"...
But don’t worry, this just means you have to think a little harder about how likely things are. David Hand writes about this in his 2014 book: The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. This is making the rounds again in the media because of the recent “rare” astronomical events.
Yesterday the Summer Solstice coincided with the Strawberry Moon – the first full moon in June. The last time this happened was in 1967. Recently we have seen “rare” transits of Mercury and Venus across the sun.
These events are not that rare, and I really don’t see what the fuss is all about (I guess the media is desperate for anything they can hype.) Don’t get me wrong, I love astronomical events, it is their rarity that I think is overhyped.
...
First it is important to recognize that when you have lots of opportunities for unlikely things to happen, they are bound to happen by chance. As I like to say, in New York City, which has a population of over 8 million people, a 1 in 8 million coincidence should happen every day.
..."
----------------------------------
A good read by Dr. Novella. Of course, Tim Minchin cuts to the chase:
"A woman had given birth to naturally conceived identical quadruplet girls, which is very rare. And she said, "The doctors told me there was a one in 64 million chance that this could happen. It's A MIRACLE!" But, of course, we know it's not, because things that have a one in 64 million chance happen ... ALL the TIME! To presume that your one in 64 million chance thing is a miracle, is to significantly underestimate the total number of things that THERE ARE. ... Maths."
-Tim Minchin
June 21, 2016
I love the phrase "useful substance free" as a correction for "100 % chemical free."
Oh, Health Ranger, you crack me up. No, really.
“Health Ranger” Sells Remedy for Disease He Doesn’t Think Exists
http://skepchick.org/2016/06/health-ranger-sells-remedy-for-disease-he-doesnt-think-exists/
I love the phrase "useful substance free" as a correction for "100 % chemical free."
Oh, Health Ranger, you crack me up. No, really.
June 21, 2016
"The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.
If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.
When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.
As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”
The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
..."
----------------------------
This piece should be read by all of us over and over again, or so I think.
The New Yorker: THE MISTRUST OF SCIENCE
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-mistrust-of-science"The following was delivered as the commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, on Friday, June 10th.
If this place has done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be tested.
When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious one.
As a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”
The scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly, that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
..."
----------------------------
This piece should be read by all of us over and over again, or so I think.
June 20, 2016
Tokyo Yosaku - CHA-RA HEAD-CHA-RA
This is just pure awesome!
Another reason to love the sport! Tokyo Yosaku - CHA-RA HEAD-CHA-RA
Tokyo Yosaku - CHA-RA HEAD-CHA-RA
This is just pure awesome!
June 20, 2016
"Donald Trump's proposed plans to cut taxes, engage in trade wars, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would hurt the U.S. economy and send the country into a recession, according to new report by Moody's Analytics.
Economists reviewed Trump's proposed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, his calls to deport undocumented immigrants and build a southern border wall, and his threats to impose large tariffs on goods imported from China and Mexico.
The analysis found that if all of Trump's proposals were implemented, "the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office."
"The upshot of Mr. Trump’s economic policy positions under almost any scenario is that the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished," the report reads.
The economists drew four basic conclusions about the impact of Trump's plans: a less global economy, larger government debt, a weaker economy with higher unemployment, and benefits mostly for high-income Americans.
..."
----------------------------------------------
Trump and his supporters are PRO-RECESSION! (And that's being very kind.)
Make sure they, and everyone else, knows it.
Moody's Analysis: Trump's Policy Plans Would Trigger A 'Lengthy Recession'
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/report-trump-cause-us-recession"Donald Trump's proposed plans to cut taxes, engage in trade wars, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would hurt the U.S. economy and send the country into a recession, according to new report by Moody's Analytics.
Economists reviewed Trump's proposed tax cuts for individuals and businesses, his calls to deport undocumented immigrants and build a southern border wall, and his threats to impose large tariffs on goods imported from China and Mexico.
The analysis found that if all of Trump's proposals were implemented, "the economy suffers a lengthy recession and is smaller at the end of his four-year term than when he took office."
"The upshot of Mr. Trump’s economic policy positions under almost any scenario is that the U.S. economy will be more isolated and diminished," the report reads.
The economists drew four basic conclusions about the impact of Trump's plans: a less global economy, larger government debt, a weaker economy with higher unemployment, and benefits mostly for high-income Americans.
..."
----------------------------------------------
Trump and his supporters are PRO-RECESSION! (And that's being very kind.)
Make sure they, and everyone else, knows it.
June 20, 2016
"It’s happened again in Yellowstone National Park. This time the victim tossed into the air by a bison is Helvetica Man.
Helvetica Man, the international graphic representation of a human that marks almost every public men’s restroom, now is on the horns of a Yellowstone buffalo. You’ve seen Helvetica Man before — slipping on wet floors and falling over crumbling cliffs. His latest misadventure appears on thousands of flyers being distributed at entrance stations to the world’s first national park.
The faceless, emotionless Helvetica Man — who’s not only slipped and fallen but also competed every Olympic event from archery to swimming to discus — put a more soulful figure out of work. Millions of Yellowstone visitors will no longer be warned by the ubiquitous yellow flyer with an illustration depicting the bison-launched, Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist.
Gone is the Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist’s tousled hair, his flying ball cap, his doomed single-lens-reflex camera and his punctured hiking shorts. Gone is the Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist’s grimace.
...
Will Yellowstone’s Helvetica Man work as a messenger? “I think we should have more blood and guts,” Benefiel said.
..."
---------------------------------------
No Helvetica Cell Phone in the air? Hmm.
Yellowstone bison gores Helvetica Man
http://www.wyofile.com/blog/yellowstone-bison-gores-helvetica-man/"It’s happened again in Yellowstone National Park. This time the victim tossed into the air by a bison is Helvetica Man.
Helvetica Man, the international graphic representation of a human that marks almost every public men’s restroom, now is on the horns of a Yellowstone buffalo. You’ve seen Helvetica Man before — slipping on wet floors and falling over crumbling cliffs. His latest misadventure appears on thousands of flyers being distributed at entrance stations to the world’s first national park.
The faceless, emotionless Helvetica Man — who’s not only slipped and fallen but also competed every Olympic event from archery to swimming to discus — put a more soulful figure out of work. Millions of Yellowstone visitors will no longer be warned by the ubiquitous yellow flyer with an illustration depicting the bison-launched, Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist.
Gone is the Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist’s tousled hair, his flying ball cap, his doomed single-lens-reflex camera and his punctured hiking shorts. Gone is the Anguished Airborne Illustrated Tourist’s grimace.
...
Will Yellowstone’s Helvetica Man work as a messenger? “I think we should have more blood and guts,” Benefiel said.
..."
---------------------------------------
No Helvetica Cell Phone in the air? Hmm.
June 20, 2016
Great stuff about the silly attacks on the game, back in the late '70s and early '80s, as well as some fantastic stuff by Junot Diaz, at the end.
Dungeons & Dragons: Lessons from a Media Panic | Retro Report
Great stuff about the silly attacks on the game, back in the late '70s and early '80s, as well as some fantastic stuff by Junot Diaz, at the end.
June 20, 2016
"...
I enjoy writing about the solstices and equinoctes* when they happen, so you can read all about how and why they occur in past articles. I’ll note that Monday is not the date of the earliest sunrise and latest sunset though; that has to do with the Earth’s orbit being slightly elliptical, so I’ll make a special point of linking to this article last year where I explain why that happens. I’ll also note that some people call this the first day of summer (or winter for those in the south), but I disagree; I tend to think of it as actually the midpoint. You can read about that to your brain’s delight as well.
No, instead of spending time on that here, I’d prefer to point out something rather special that led to me wandering down a rabbit hole Sunday night as I researched it: Not only is the solstice Monday, but the Moon is full on Monday as well. That moment occurred at 11:02 UTC (07:02 Eastern; I’ll note it’ll look full all day and probably even Tuesday as well).
A full Moon on the same day as the June solstice (or the December one, for that matter) is relatively rare. As I thought about this Sunday night, I wondered just how rare it was. My first thought was that it probably happens once every 30 years or so, since the full Moon can occur on any day, and there are 30 in June.
But then I realized it’s not that simple. Sometimes in astronomy two cycles can beat together in unusual ways, throwing off what you might expect. So I dug into it. I found a list of solstice full Moon dates on the Farmer’s Almanac website, and perusing the numbers it appears that we get a full Moon on the June solstice roughly every 19 years or so … or multiples thereof.
..."
A fun read, with links to more fine reading.
So, yes, A Happy Full Moon Solstice to all!
Happy Full Moon Solstice!
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/06/20/full_moon_solstice_june_20_2016_has_both.html"...
I enjoy writing about the solstices and equinoctes* when they happen, so you can read all about how and why they occur in past articles. I’ll note that Monday is not the date of the earliest sunrise and latest sunset though; that has to do with the Earth’s orbit being slightly elliptical, so I’ll make a special point of linking to this article last year where I explain why that happens. I’ll also note that some people call this the first day of summer (or winter for those in the south), but I disagree; I tend to think of it as actually the midpoint. You can read about that to your brain’s delight as well.
No, instead of spending time on that here, I’d prefer to point out something rather special that led to me wandering down a rabbit hole Sunday night as I researched it: Not only is the solstice Monday, but the Moon is full on Monday as well. That moment occurred at 11:02 UTC (07:02 Eastern; I’ll note it’ll look full all day and probably even Tuesday as well).
A full Moon on the same day as the June solstice (or the December one, for that matter) is relatively rare. As I thought about this Sunday night, I wondered just how rare it was. My first thought was that it probably happens once every 30 years or so, since the full Moon can occur on any day, and there are 30 in June.
But then I realized it’s not that simple. Sometimes in astronomy two cycles can beat together in unusual ways, throwing off what you might expect. So I dug into it. I found a list of solstice full Moon dates on the Farmer’s Almanac website, and perusing the numbers it appears that we get a full Moon on the June solstice roughly every 19 years or so … or multiples thereof.
..."
A fun read, with links to more fine reading.
So, yes, A Happy Full Moon Solstice to all!
June 13, 2016
Ugh.
Back then, it seemed so harsh and yet we could fight it.
What about now?
The horrors in Orlando and Trump's ugly campaign were predicted by The Police.
&list=RDug-qQ6fXevo#t=5Ugh.
Back then, it seemed so harsh and yet we could fight it.
What about now?
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