I would say the answer is to read profound books, and then move. I was in a situation where I drank continuously for several years because I was stuck in a dead-end job in a dead-end town. The real thing to do is 2-fold: 1) figure out what the big story is, not the piddly immediate stuff; watch Michael Wood histories, read Carl Sagan, read Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Get interested in hobbies that will link you with NATURE and the universe at large. Examples might be SURFING, HIKING, ASTRONOMY, GEOLOGY, FIELD_BIOLOGY. These are important because it snaps you out of…
> The short terse answers yielding very little substantive information You asked, I answered. > The goal is to mutually improve understanding Agreed. So what is your alternative? I am aware of the Lamarkian effect of methylation on DNA, and I'm vaguely aware that there might be another mechanism at the cellular level. I'm also aware of Darwin's gemmules theory which I understand is thoroughly discredited now. You seem very determined not to say what you're proposing. > I highly doubt you have done it to any great extent True. It was a course at school, and that was a long time ago. It…
Since my school days I always thought Theory of Knowledge was the most important and underrated class. That's where you talk about the scientific method and how we discover facts. Somehow it was only worth a tiny portion of the international baccalaureate. Basically this essay is correct. Science is taught the wrong way. It should all be a mix of history (of thought) and experiments that guided that thinking. Something like that Bill Bryson book, a brief history of everything. Instead of telling kids the end result, tell them how we got there. Basically, follow the method that you say you…
This is where classes that teach the HISTORY of science and how discoveries were made can be so valuable. I was recently reading Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything" and he does an excellent job of explaining how each discovery led into the next. He also describes how some discoveries just took a long time because either the apparatus to make that discovery didn't exist yet or the right person didn't have the right idea. As a personal example, in a college "History of Economics" class, the professor described the "Diamond/Water Paradox". Prior to understanding how the…
One thing you can be sure of is that the states that became wealthy from fossil fuels will write histories that proclaim the virtues of fossil fuels, and the wisdom of the courses they navigated, in peace and in war. “If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth's history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a…
I think the general consensus is that if you find something useful, after pirating it, you will pay for it. Pirating removes the need to buy first to see if you really like it or is it something you really want. I can only speak for myself. I have pirated many softwares and books to see if I find value in it. If I do, I pay for it later. For instance, I recently pirated a book (A Short History of Nearly Everything) and I loved it so much, I bought two copies the same week and gave them out as gifts to people who I am sure never heard of that book or the author and who doesn't like reading…
Reminds me of the chapter on lichens from Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything. A short excerpt: You might not think there would be that many people in the world prepared to devote lifetimes to the study of something so inescapably low key, but in fact moss people number in the hundreds and they feel very strongly about their subject. “Oh, yes,” Ellis told me, “the meetings can get very lively at times.” I asked him for an example of controversy. “Well, here’s one inflicted on us by one of your countrymen,” he said, smiling lightly, and opened a hefty reference work…
Non-fiction: * 'Better' by Atul Gawande (also his 'Complications' and of course 'The Checklist Manifesto') * 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' by Bill Bryson. Fiction: * 'Fragile Things: Short Fictions and Wonders' by Neil Gaiman * 'The Name of the Wind' by Patrick Rothfuss Graphic novels ("comics"): * 'Watchmen' by Alan Moore * 'Promethea' by Alan Moore (actually I'm halfway through this, and loving every bit of it) Special mentions: * 'How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big' by Scott Adams - I only gave this a 4-star rating on Goodreads when I finished it, but…
Meanwhile, while re-exploring the RSS offer from The Economist following advice from a parallel thread, I found this article: The Economist reads, Science - What to read to understand how science works https://www.economist.com/the-economist-reads/2022/08/17/wha... The texts suggested in the article are: Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything ; Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species ; Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks ; Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat ; Primo Levi, The Periodic Table ; Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things…
Yeah, I like this, but it becomes less effective as the scale increases. At "Here is the Earth", the line for Today should be invisible (certainly not the same width as in "Here is this century"). It demonstrates the limits of this kind of explicitly visual approach. By contrast, language, which leverages the imagination, can be even more effective at revealing how insignificant we are: "...stretch your arms to their fullest extent and imagine that width as the entire [4.5 Billion year] history of the Earth. On this scale...the distance from the fingertips of one hand to the wrist of the…