TUMBLR
A scrapbook of stuff I'm reading / looking at / listening to / thinking about...
Posts tagged "science"
At NASA’s Drawing Board - J R Eyerman
Reblogging just so I can resurrect the “chalkboards” tag
(via wnycradiolab)
The artist vs. the scientist
I am a scientist
I seek to understand me
All of my impurities
and evils yet unknown
—Guided By Voices
Because artists and scientists don’t hang around each other quite enough, they accumulate odd imaginations about each other. Here a great scientist talks about an artist who imagines that scientists have a inferior imaginative take on things.
It was fun to find out while reading Lawrence Weschler’s books on Robert Irwin and David Hockney that both artists spent a good amount of time hanging out with scientists and felt a special kinship with them.
Robert Irwin in Seeing Is Forgetting The Name Of The Thing One Sees:
Everyone involved on a particular level of asking questions, whether he’s a physicist or a philosopher or an artist, is essentially involved in the same questions. They are universal in that sense… although we may use different methods to come at them…
The scientist in the video above is the great Richard Feynman. Here’s an excerpt of what he says:
The way I think of what we are doing is, we are exploring, we are trying to find out as much as we can about the world. People say to me, “Are you looking for the ultimate laws of physics?” No I am not. I am just looking to find out more about the world.
Hockney, in True To Life:
Finding out that [art and science are] not that different has been very exciting for me. The more I’ve read of mathematicians and physicists, the more engrossed I’ve become. They really seem like artists to me. One’s struck how it’s almost a notion of beauty which seems to be guiding them, how at the frontiers of inquiry, contemporary physics even seems to be approaching and acknowledging eternal mysteries.
Feynman explains why the unknown doesn’t bother him:
I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong… I don’t feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe…
This is very much the attitude that the writer Donald Barthelme said was essential to the creation of art:
The writer is one who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do… The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention… Writing is a process of dealing with not-knowing…
Irwin says the process of inquiry that an artist goes through is a lot like a chemist’s, in that “What you do when you start to do a painting is that you begin with a basic idea, a hypothesis of what you’re setting out to do,” and then the rest is a lot of experimenting and trial-and-error.
But there are some essential differences, mainly that it’s hard to retrace an artist’s thought process (although, some artists leave a better paper trail than others…):
“Once the scientist is finished, you can look back over his notes to consider the precise sequence of yes-no weighings which brought him to his solution. It’s all quite logical and structured… The artist, on the other hand, keeps no such record (although historians would love it if he did). Rather, he literally paints over his errors. Six months later, when you ask him, ‘Why did you stop there?’ and he replies, ‘Well, because it felt right,’ his answer may not seem acceptable from a logical point of view… but in fact it’s quite reasonable. Given the basic fundamentals, he’s tried just about every damn combination possible, every way possible, until he’s finally arrived at what makes sense to him. The critical difference is that the artist measures from his intuition, his feeling. In other words, he uses himself as the measure.
(Source: xyvch)
Barry Commoner Dies at 95 - NYTimes.com
He was called “the Paul Revere of Environmentalism.”
His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
That’s the second great Marxist we’ve lost this week at the age of 95. RIP.
Filed under: chalkboards, obituaries
This semester, The Near-Sighted Monkey is spending a lot of time at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery hanging around scientists and thinking about how they use their hands and how we use our hands when we are trying to figure something out or explain something.
Does being able to write out a problem by hand have some advantage over typing it onto a screen? What is it? How does it differ?
Says the Near-Sighted Monkey about her first day at WID:
“There are white boards and markers every which way you look on the upper floors of the WID building and they are often covered with what look like long dense sentences — I don’t even know what to call them. Are they formulas? These sloping rows of hand-written shapes. They are beautiful. Straightforward un-self conscious calligraphy—- numbers over letters with tinier numbers next to them and then sudden epsilons and deltas and symbols I’ve never seen before like an equal sign drawn wiggly which I think means “pretty much equals”.
I could watch the people at WID draw their formulas out on white boards all day.
When I told one of the mathematicians I met how surprised I was to find people doing so much writing by hand, he told me he needs a pencil in his hand when he’s thinking. He said most of the mathematicians he knows are the same way. “
How can our hands help us think something out?
Filed under: use your hands
(Source: handdrawnbyhand)
Einstein and Picasso compare drawings (from Steve Martin's PICASSO AT THE LAPIN AGILE)
- EINSTEIN: It's perfect.
- PICASSO: Thank you.
- EINSTEIN: I'm talking about mine.
- PICASSO: It's a formula.
- EINSTEIN: So's yours.
- PICASSO: It was a little hastily drawn… Yours is letters.
- EINSTEIN: Yours is lines.
- PICASSO: My lines mean something.
- EINSTEIN: So do mine.
- PICASSO: Mine is beautiful.
- EINSTEIN: Men have swooned on seeing that (indicates his own drawing).
- PICASSO: Mine touches the heart.
- EINSTEIN: Mine touches the head.
- PICASSO: (holds his drawing): This will change the future.
- EINSTEIN: (holds his drawing): Oh, and this won't?
The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees
13-year-old studies trees and Fibonacci sequence, comes up with a design for better solar panels. Awesome.
Darryl Cunningham Investigates: Evolution
Great comic about evolution. Thx, @scottmccloud
One Professor’s Attempt to Explain Every Joke Ever
Good read, but Robert Mankoff (The New Yorker cartoon editor) has the last word:
“All these theories are so general that they’re of no use when you’re trying to craft a good cartoon.”
(Source: readability.com)
Fascinating profile of a scientist who researches cellphones and automobile crashes, and the philosophy he pulls out of his research:
Life is a marathon, not a sprint….A great deal of mischief occurs when people are in a rush….Every driver on average thinks he’s in the wrong lane. You think more cars are passing you when you’re actually passing them just as quickly. Still, you make a lane change where the benefits are illusory and not real.
Also, @pomeranian99 points out his awesome method of writing e-mails as a list of numbered statements, like this:
15) I sometimes tell a joke to tackle the issue
16) that is, about people’s ability to judge “frivolity”
17) namely, imagine Charles Darwin 150 years ago
18) at the time he disappointed his father by neglecting medical training
19) and asked, instead, to go on a two-year vacation in the tropics
20) with an emphasis on bird watching (finches)
21) the father was not impressed and thought the son was wasting his time
Dr. Redelmeier says he numbers the e-mails “in order to focus on the content of a message rather than get distracted by grammar, punctuation and syntax.”
I dig it.
File under “Science telling us what folk wisdom has told us forever”:
“We remain recognizably the same person,” said study author Christopher Nave, a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Riverside. “This speaks to the importance of understanding personality because it does follow us wherever we go across time and contexts.”
…
Personality is “a part of us, a part of our biology,” Nave said.
I’m much closer to the person I wanted to be when I was 10 than when I was 20. I think that’s a good thing.
