Category: misc
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Inventing the Flat Earth
Quotes from Nancy Marie Brown, The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Ages p. 129 ‘The error begins with the Italian poet Petrarch, who is known for two things: developing the sonnet, and coining the therm “the Dark Ages”. Sometimes called the first…
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Parapsychology in the Cold War
Quotes from David Kaiser, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival p. 90 “The CIA, like other branches of the defense establishment, had begun to harbor fears of ‘psi gap’ vis-a-vis the Soviets, the consequences of of which could prove as devastating (according to some) as the missile gap and the…
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Von Neumann as a Hawk
Quotes from Peter Byrne, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family p. 73-74 “And along with his fellow hydrogen bomb-engineers, Edward Teller and John Wheeler, von Neumann was certain that preparing to wage nuclear war was a historical necessity. Life magazine recalled in…
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Religious Robots
Quotes from Robert Geraci, Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality p. 133 “Ray Kurzweil believes that intelligent machines will be more spiritual than human being and believes that the future will include real and virtual houses of worship where intelligent machines will congregate (Kurzweil 1999, 153). Naturally, since all…
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Franklin and Jefferson on science vs. public service
Quotes from Edmund S. Morgan, Benjamin Franklin (Yale Nota Bene) p. 25-26 “Obviously the man we want to know had something other than riches in mind when he retired from business. Given his interest in science – he was just beginning his electrical experiments – he could have devoted the rest of his life to…
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Mathematics as Escape
Quotes from Edward Dolnick, The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, Chapter Twenty-One “Shuddering Before the Beautiful” ‘For the mathematically minded, the notion of glimpsing God’s plan has always exerted a hypnotic pull. The seduction is twofold. On the one hand, delving into the world’s mathematical secrets…
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Interesting Facts about Galileo
I listen to Galileo by John L. Heilbron. Some interesting facts from the book are below together with links that I have found in Internet. Galileo about Inferno Galileo has started his scientific career with a speech about how Inferno looks like where he has applied his mathematical genius to find out which theory was the…
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Gadget: Warum die Zukunft uns noch braucht
This is my writing for a German lesson. Die Zeitung Die Zeit ist zu meiner Hauptquelle von Informationen geworden. Ich höre im Zug die Artikel von der Audio-Zeit an, das ist einerseits bequem, anderseits interessant. Dieses mal war es genau so, in der Zeit gab es einen Artikel über das Buch Gadget: Warum die Zukunft…