Good morning (to most of you)! As promised, here’s the first of the special editions and I’m very excited. A lot of these pieces are a little old; but they’re all very good. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did.
- Why the high-tech ideas of ‘Bucky’ Fuller are back in vogue - Buckminster Fuller was one of the most enigmatic people of the last century. The man who invented the geodesic dome, or the buckyball as we know it better, was quite a character and this piece does a good job of exploring his ideas and also examining why he is becoming more popular in today’s world.
The very title of his lecture series, Everything I Know, reveals a Fullerian audacity – a belief in the firmness of his knowledge and the power of his reason, a conviction that everything in his head was worth preserving. He maunders across mathematics and architecture, history and economics, engineering and education, even God and love. He spends hours on the properties of the tetrahedron and other shapes, discussing them in tones of near-mystic reverence. He seems enamoured by the power of geometry, maps, drawings and diagrams to capture and distill the relationships between elements in a system. - Quick, How Might the Alien Spacecraft Work? - I watched the movie Arrival last year, and it was lovely. In this post, Steven Wolfram talks about the science and equations behind the movie, and how he developed most of the framework for it.
- The Sparrow With Four Sexes - This title sounds horribly clickbaity, but it isn’t. This species of sparrow, the white-throated sparrow found in North America, has four different sexes. The first division is male and female, but then each bird can also have either white or tan stripes. This distinction dictates who can mate with whom as well, so the bird effectively can be one of four sexes.
- Why Fake Data When You Can Fake a Scientist? - There is a lot wrong with the academic world at present and this is just one of those things. In an age when a scientist is judged by the number of papers and citations, it helps to have an ‘alter-ego’ who cites all your work. Something like that is happening here.
- Why Vitamin Pills Don’t Work, And May Be Bad For You - An interesting perspective to this. The article claims that at best vitamin pills are grossly ineffective, and at worst they might cause a premature death.
- The Woman Who Might Find Us Another Earth - A lovely profile of Sara Seager, an astronomer who is obsessed with finding potentially life-harbouring planets. All her time goes into her work, and there’s very little left for her personal life - husband and kids. She’s an inspiring woman, and this profile does justice to both her scientific life and her (rather lack of a) personal life.
- The ‘Gay Cure’ Experiments That Were Written out of Scientific History - A rather grisly set of experiments that aren’t part of the popular history of neuroscience. Robert Heath claimed that he could cure homosexuality by ‘implanting electrodes into the pleasure centre of the brain’. Heath was a gifted doctor, but was blind to the faults of his own method. He had a hypothesis that we know now to be on shaky ground, but all he did over many many years was to test it again, again and again.
- How Ant Societies Point to Radical Possibilities for Humans - Interesting thoughts on the parallels between human work and ant societies. What is the best way to divide labour? Must each person be specialised to do only task? Or should we switch and jump between tasks depending on what’s needed? One of my favourite essays from Aeon.
- A New Physics Theory of Life - Jeremy England claims that, via the arguments of thermodynamics, the evolution of life on Earth “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.” He may or may not be right, but this is definitely an interesting perspective.
“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said. - A Possible Break in One of Evolution’s Biggest Mysteries - We don’t know how whales ended up in the ocean; huge mammals like whales are found more on land. Or rather, whales are the only large mammals we find in the water. Scientists have now been able to trace their history back using the barnacles that accumulate in their bodies. Fascinating.
