via Cheezburger.com
Welcome to the first meeting of The Finch and Pea’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50th anniversary bull session book club. Grab a drink, pull up a chair, and let’s talk about the first four chapters of that book you always meant to read.
First, a brief word about the preface. Certain famous books are prefaced with apologetic comments by the author, warning us that what is to follow is just an outline or a sketch. We tend to smirk of over the fact that Darwin considered his 502-page behemoth just an abstract. Kuhn says similar things in his preface to Structure, but in this case I take Kuhn’s apologies more seriously. Historical examples are important in this book, but Kuhn tends to allude to episodes in the history of science, rather than discuss them – at least in the first four chapters. Perhaps this is fitting, because in Kuhn’s view, a successful paradigm necessarily leaves a lot left to be done. Continue reading “How science climbs out of the chaotic morass and into paradigms and puzzles”
This is a repost of an article that originally appeared at The Paltry Sapien on 10 August 2012.
American football. Not proper football. We already fixed that once. We call it rugby.
Speaking of which, we were at a dinner party when the subject of my rugby career was brought up (not by me). A discussion about surviving a full contact sport without padding (don’t hit with your head and hit with forces below the physiological limits of the human body) transitioned into a discussion of how to reduce debilitating injuries in American football.
In the presence of a rugger, people like to suggest getting rid of the helmets and pads. It is the pads that allow American football to be so violent1. You could reduce the violence and, therefore, the injuries by getting rid of pads; but that’s not going to happen. American football is a violent sport. The fans like the violence. The players like the violence.
And, helmets and pads are necessary for the single most important element of modern American football: the forward pass.
Charlotte Jarvis’ Blighted by Kenning is a unique cross-disciplinary art project that draws upon nature and biblical symbolism as well as cutting-edge science. As she describes it:
The project has bio-engineered a bacteria which has the Universal Declaration of Human Rights encoded into its DNA sequence. The DNA has been extracted and apples grown near The Hague, which houses the International Court of Justice, have been ‘contaminated’ with the synthetic DNA. They are currently being sent to genomics laboratories around the world, which have been asked to sequence the declaration and also to eat the fruit. Continue reading “The Art of Science: Fruit of Knowledge”
The Finch and Pea 