“ATOMYRIADES” by Piet Hein (Danish mathematician and poet)

This push me back to Keanu Reeves movie with Morgan Freeman called,”Chain Reaction.” To see “resonances” used in this way?

We had talked previously on the basis of, “I am Legend” as well in this same respect.

I think this goes to the idea that scientists are somehow indeed nerdy, in that they like to spend their time resolute, looking for the secrets to life. White coats and all, glasses to peer ever deeply into the very fabric of the nature of the universe. IN the movie this take was different, having a compadre to help him along.

But yes, it is more then that.

I can relate in that I was interested in ionic generators and tried crudely to manufacture all the parts myself. So seeing a lathe being used, or metal fabrication being done, along side of the intricate, well, I would not say, so far as the electronics and soldering you had done.

I did get shocks playing with the old tube radios.:)

I think this is the kind of adventure “with invention” is what gives one a boost to keeping on top of technological developments. If one had never been a participant to technological change, one might never understand the changes one has to make in adapting. In my case what was intuitive in technological processes now became detach from the way i had always done things.

These examples I am sure can be the thoughts shared by our scientists and the way they did there counting and observations of tracks left in the bubble chambers?

Over all, I liked the show very much too.

No, I was not. Was barely out of school myself. I was in my second year as an undergraduate, and Princeton was a dream away then. The dreams probably began a year and a half (or maybe two) later when I read “Who Got Einstein’s Office?” by Ed Regis.

Fantastic to hear about your school and the parade!

-cvj

Working on hiring agents for lots of things… so sure, you can lobby to be my product placement agent!
-cvj

How much do you get for product placement from Duvel and for that matter Brompton bikes. If not can I be your agent?
Just examined my GR course on Monday. All passed and some did very well, which sort of satisfying. Hope your exam goes well too..

David B

And you then point to Shifting Baselines.

Quote from Scienceblogs,”Shifting Literature by Jennifer L. Jacquet?

Ursula Le Guin

In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it–everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

So we lost something in the technological exchange, and thusly, accounts for the decline?

On/Off

Anyway, I was thinking of a comparison movie that I saw a long time ago. I knew it was about “book burning.” So of course, I googled and wiki’d it.

Symbol of the “New York Society for the Suppression of Vice”, advocating book-burning.

So here’s a possible scene unfolding, not having seen the film mentioned.

An incident in the New Plot of, “The Cultural Decline.”

This is the “police badge” above, used by the peace officers for the “over achievers” who secretly read books.

No one, reads books anymore.

It’s one of those regretful actions. That by mistake, Johnny burns a rare copy of a book unknowingly trying to prove his point?
———————–

But more to your point about peering into the movie itself?

The medium is the message by Marshall Luhan

McLuhan also claimed in Understanding Media that different media invite different degrees of participation on the part of a person who chooses to consume a medium. Some media, like the movies, enhance one single sense, in this case vision, in such a manner that a person does not need to exert much effort in filling in the details of a movie image. McLuhan contrasted this with TV, which he claimed requires more effort on the part of viewer to determine meaning, and comics, which due to their minimal presentation of visual detail require a high degree of effort to fill in details that the cartoonist may have intended to portray. A movie is thus said by McLuhan to be “hot”, intensifying one single sense “high definition”, demanding a viewer’s attention, and a comic book to be “cool” and “low definition”, requiring much more conscious participation by the reader to extract value.[4] This concentration on the medium itself, and how it conveys information — rather than on the specific content of the information — is the focal point of “the medium is the message”.

New medium, new ways to think about cultural decline. Bee certainly thinks about it a lot. I couldn’t help remember the library’s and pictures you had in a post previous.

Will have to watch for it.

Its also a psychological fact, that most people tend to see the world around them as somehow lesser than it used to be. A nostalgia of sorts that has a tendency to make anecdotal reports problematic.

I feel the same way frankly, but then many of the numbers don’t really seem to back the impression up.

> Now, a majority of people seem to *choose* ignorance and take pride > in it. I agree with that.

And the weight of the culture, and its various powerful means of dissemination, is such that it seems to be getting harder to choose otherwise for many.

Cheers,

-cvj

Cheers,

-cvj

Best,

Emily

Allied to the degeneration into a culture where people are not encouraged to think for themselves is the fear that when people end up doing silly things as a result of their own not-thinking, they will blame/sue.

-cvj

By the way, one thing the instructions didn’t specify is if you had to keep your direction vector steadily rotating in the same direction. What happens if instead of making 4 right hand turns you make 3 right hand turns, 1 left hand turn, and then 2 right hand turns?

If you have questions about folding bikes, I might be able to help a bit with navigating through the mess. Email me.

But why would you want anything other than a cute Brompton like the one pictured above?!
-cvj

It is little to do with intelligence, and everything to do with education, and the value placed on it by society at a given time, vs other things. I am quite sure that I am no more intelligent than that person in the store who, annoyingly, knows nothing about their merchandise. It is just that it is not seen as important any more for them to learn about it - nor to take pride in knowing.

I read a lot of history, and so am mostly on the fence about how much we’ve changed for many things… nevertheless changes do happen, even if cyclic. I do think that anti-intellectualism dominates (or threatens to dominate) the culture more than it ever did in recent times. Especially if it serves the political ends of the people in control of very large power bases.

There are probably pocket examples of this in the past here and there, but I don’t think it was always like this. It is tied to the greater immediacy and reach that mass media has as compared to before. That is largely new (as a matter of both scale and penetration), and so new phenomena can appear that had not been present before.

Also, I think that the stakes are very high here. An anti-intellectual culture affected the election of a knowledge-suppressing government of the most powerful country on the planet, for example.

Cheers,

-cvj