Category: Ionian Enchantment

Sun Credit: onlinewoman A hydroelectric dam converts the motion energy of water flowing downhill into electrical energy through mechanical turbines. The water flowing downhill expends the gravitational energy it stored when it was deposited up in the mountains. The water got from the ocean to the mountaintop via thermal energy, which evaporated it into the…

Baby and Godmother Credit: kton25 Harvard Psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn presents a fascinating conundrum concerning the development of a human embryo: In order for the brain to process the two images our eyes transmit to it in 3-D stereovision, complete with the ability to estimate distances accurately, it must know the distance between the eyes;…

Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself. – Edward O. Wilson In David Brin’s The Postman, greatest post-apocalyptic book ever, the protagonist finds shelter in an old mail truck and keeps warm by making a blanket out of the letters. Recently, Vicky and I checked out the Camden County Jeep Trail,…

General Jan Christiaan Smuts is probably equally remembered for his support of apartheid in South Africa and for originating the concept of holism, understanding systems as a whole, as opposed to reductionism, understanding them as the sum of their parts, in his book Holism and Evolution. Einstein found the work as impressive philosophically as his…

The great tragedy of Science is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact. – Thomas Huxley The recent news of scientists identifying the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II’s missing children, confirms they were executed in 1918 and ends nearly a century of fanciful stories and speculation about the possibility of his youngest…

Freedom Located atop the dome of the United States Capitol Building Sculptor:Thomas Crawford Credit: dbking Last year, in attending my brother’s spiritual wedding, I had the opportunity to experience an all-night hug-fest celebrating Amma the “Hugging Mother,” a Hindu spiritual leader, who travels the world hugging thousands of people a night and doing charity work.…

In 2003 DARPA was researching the potential of a prediction market to guide policy in defense against terrorism. Called FutureMAP, the program was abandoned under heavy criticism from Congress, which percieved the program as people gambling on the odds of a terror attack. There were many policies to criticize in the War on Terror, but…

One of those nifty facts Einstein discovered in his Theory of Relativity is that the force of gravity affects time. The more gravity, the slower time progresses until time appears to a stop in a black hole from the perspective of an outside observer. This natural phenomenon is known as Gravitational time dilation. Spacetime Curvature…

There is grandeur in this view of life… from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. – Charles Darwin I firmly reject the idea of The Great Man theory that history is punctuated by the occurrence of elite heroes, and I don’t think Darwin would…

Here I thought I was so cool coming up with “Somma’s Stochaistic,” the idea that science is inversely proportional to BS: Somma’s Stochaistic Now I find out somebody else all ready came up with it and expressed it my more elegantly in something called: Bayesian Probability. The equation for this concept looks like this: Bayesian…

Photosynthetic Electron Transport Chain (Powered by the Sun) Credit: Tameeria at the wikipedia So the recent news of researchers synthesizing RNA that can replicate indefinitely kind of stuck with me, particularly the word indefinitely. This isn’t perpetual motion, because the molecule only works so long as it has a supply of molecules to manipulate. But…