Technically the Earth rotates around the barycenter of our solar system, not the sun.

Gravity travels (right word?) roughly the speed of light, so just like if the sun disappeared we wouldn’t see the light disappear for ~8 minutes, we also wouldn’t leave orbit for ~ 8 min.

“There was a time before the Internet. Innovation and creativity were different then…” p. 104 The Future of Ideas

copyright, patent, intellectual property rights, end to end, World Wide Web, media, the future of technology, the history if the internet, commons

the tragedy of the commons

The “Milgram Experiment,” along with the Stanford Prison Experiment, is probably one of the better-known sociological experiments of the ’60s / ’70s. While I knew the basics (a person goes in for a psychological experiment—supposedly about the affects of punishment on learning—and is told by an experimenter to shock the “learner” (actually an actor) with increasingly higher voltage), the book was good in explaining how they varied the experiment to delve into the reasons for people’s behavior. Milgram and his colleagues were surprised at the percentages of people who obeyed the experimenter and shocked the “learner” while he is strapped down to a chair and protesting in pain, so they did a thorough job of investigating the reasons for this unexpected behavior. They also went beyond proving that people tend to obey authority and tested out what constitutes “authority.”

Roles: “teacher” — the actual subject, the person who came in for the supposed learning experiment; “learner” — an actor supposedly getting shocked; “experimenter” — the person in charge of the experiment

In the most basic version the teacher and learner arrive, are told by the experimenter about the learning experiment, and draw assignments from a hat as to who will be learner and who will be teacher. The drawing is rigged, but it’s an important aspect of the experiment (one of very few topics that Milgram doesn’t address as much as I would have liked) that the teacher think that he/she could just as easily have been in the other role, getting shocked.

The book is well worth reading, and I won’t get into all Milgram’s explanations and findings, but here are the versions of the experiment:

Experiment (# of people) (explanation)

1 Remote (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down, but no feedback; only deterrent is that shock levels are labeled as dangerous)

2 Voice-Feedback (40) (learner in the other room, strapped down and yelling in pain after the 150v shock level)

3 Proximity (40) (learner in the same room)

4 Touch-Proximity (40) (learner in the same room and refusing to be shocked, teacher must hold his hand to shock pad to proceed)

5 More Meager Lab (40) (new version of same experiment — this lab is not as fancy looking)

6 Change of Personnel (40) (if the learner seems more dominating, would that change things?)

7 Experimenter Absent (40) (experimenter leaves the room, is available by phone to tell the teacher to continue administering shocks)

8 Women (40) (all other groups were men only; this is male experimenter, male learner, female teacher)

9 Heart Condition (40) (learner begins the experiment by mentioning he has a minor heart condition)

10 Office Building (40) (setting is local office building instead of university lab)

11 Subject Chooses Shock Level (40) (teacher does not administer shocks beyond the maximum level he feels comfortable shocking the victim at)

12 Learner Demands to Be Shocked (20) (experimenter says let’s stop, but learner says let’s go on)

13 Ordinary Man Gives Orders (20) (instead of the experimenter being in charge, another supposed subject (actually another actor) is involved — another rigged drawing puts the three in their roles)

13a Subject as Bystander (16) (if in 13, the teacher refuses to admister shocks, the third person says “If you won’t, I will”)

14 Authority as Victim (20) (learner refuses to be shocked until he sees the experimenter go through the situation first)

15 Two Authorities, Contradictory Commands (20) (two experimenters giving opposite commands — continue / stop)

16 Two Authorities, One as Victim (20) (combination of 15 and 14)

17 Two Peers Rebel * (40) (there are three co-teachers (two of them are actors), and the two opt out at certain points)

18 Peer Administers Shocks (40) (subject is in the room in teacher role, but co-teacher with someone else who has to actually push the button)

*This is the only one that’s not entirely satisfyingly explained, which Milgram admits. More of the “teachers” refused to finish the experiment in this situation, but is that peer influence, or realizing there are no repercussions for quitting, or the idea of quitting being introduced as an option, or feeling judged by the other two (who remain in the room) for proceeding when they didn’t, etc.

(I discovered this not by looking up Heaviside, though he would’ve deserved as much, but by reading about Tesla’s research into transmitting power and energy wirelessly. I thought something like, “Hey, there’s Heaviside again. This guy I’d never heard of until yesterday certainly gets around. Where has he been all my life?” (an approximation… my actual thought was more along the lines of “Should I have heard of him? Was I just not paying attention in physics?”))

Notes (taken on a receipt that I managed to scrounge up (didn’t have a notebook with me) for something purchased 02-06-10 for *5.00 and *0.49 tx, which I now remember was a Norton Critical Edition of Death in Venice from Counterpoint):

Intro:
quote from the book comparing the growth of math to the growth of a city

Crease:

• inspiration for the book came from looking at a “e=mc^2″ ornament — how equations have become symbolic and taken on cultural meaning

.

• Pythagorean Theorem
• symbol of a proof
• c^2 = a^2 + b^2, rule known of well before Pythagoras, but the Greeks did the proof
• first extant example of the proof in Plato’s Meno
• people are still trying to discover new ways to prove this, there are hundreds of variations already; proving this anew is not about the contribution to mathematics but the joy of discovery
• anecdote of when Einstein was 12 and first saw this proof, idea of universal rules

.

• F = ma and gravity
• Galileo as bridge between Aristotle and Newton; his idea that mass is something separate from weight
• story of apple traced back to Newton himself
• Newton would ask how? not why? (had to do with his theology)

.

• e = mc^2 and general relativity
• why we know it in this form (with the corrective amount left off) due to a book on the Manhattan Project after the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• has become a symbol for knowledge itself
• Einstein wanted to combine seemingly disparate ideas of Maxwell’s and Newton’s

.

• e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
• evidence in Los Angeles trial
• (my note: see footnote pg. 199 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea about Euler’s equation as the “paragon of mathematical beauty”)

.

• entropy
• referenced across disciplines in works, for example of Stoppard and Pynchon)

.

• uncertainty Heisenberg and Schrodinger
• Copenhagen play: Bohr vs. Heisenberg on making sense
• uncertainty and quantum in popular culture — painting, literature, scultpure, theology, literary criticism, humor (A cop pulls Heisenberg over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”)
• people know that observations had and effect before Heisenberg

.

• Maxwell’s equations
• didn’t actually write the equations (as we know them) himself, Heaviside did that later

.

• how equations changed through history
• often given in words first, and becomes “catchier” later, such and Newton with F = ma
• at some point “=” and “+” etc. had to be invented

.

• Suggested reading: David Lindley’s Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science

.

• side note: several of these equations are on the steps outside of LAPL

*3 “Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?” by Laurence C. Smith
–how global warming will affect where we settle with consideration to infrastructure already in place in Canada, Scandinavia, and Russia

*17 “Mirror Neurons: Are We Ethical by Nature?” by Christian Keysers
–how one person’s premotor cortex, for ex., will mirror that of someone they’re watching perform a task and how that might be an argument for “intuitive altruism”

*26 “How to Enhance Human Beings” by Nick Bostrom
–a look at possible enhancements with a look to why evolution may not have already enhanced us in these ways (“changed trade-offs,” “value discordance,” and/or “evolutionary restrictions”)

41 “Our Place in an Unnatural Universe” by Sean Carroll
–entropy, physics

53 “Just What Is Dark Energy?” by Stephon H. S. Alexander
–dark matter/cosmological constant

70 “Development of the Social Brain in Adolescence” by Sarah-Jayne Blackmore
–social brain / mentalizing, brain doesn’t stop changing in early childhood

*78 “Watching Minds Interact” by Jason P. Mitchell
–social brain

90 “What Makes Big Ideas Sticky” by Matthew D. Lieberman
–Descartes vs. Becher, Eastern vs. Western culture, are our brains predisposed to believe or need to believe certain things?

*105 “Fruit Flies of the Moral Mind” by Joshua D. Greene
–moral dilemmas, are our “moral” decisions based on evolutionary instincts? and how do these interact in a newly technological world that evolution hasn’t yet caught up with?

*117 “How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?” by Lera Boroditsky
–how the structure of language might impact culture, the Kuuk Thaayorre in Australia always use cardinal directions to indicate direction (instead of “left” “right” “behind”) (doesn’t seem to adequately explain that it’s language that causes the difference in thought and not thought that causes the difference in language or some other cause)

*131 “Memory Enhancement, Memory Erasure: The Future of Our Past” by Sam Cooke
–nootropics, erasing memories, creating memories

145 “The Vital Importance of Imagination” by Deena Skolnick Weisberg
–differences in imagination between children and adults, imagination as a tool for learning

*156 “Brain Time” by David M. Eagleman
–how our brain handles the fact that sensory input happening at the same time takes different amounts of time to reach our brain

171 “Out of Our Minds: How Did Homo sapiens Come Down from the Trees, and Why Did No One Follow?” by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare
–dogs, silver foxes, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans: communication and cooperation

186 “The Aliens Among Us” by Nathan Wolfe
–viruses: the good and the bad

*198 “How Did the Social Insects Become Social?” by Seirian Sumner
–socially polymorphic bees and wasps that can choose to be social or not: are these the evolutionary link between non-social and wholly social? what are the evolutionary benefits of having only one queen?

212 “Extinction and the Evolution of Humankind” by Katerina Havarti
–the extinction of other branches of humankind

225 “Why Hasn’t Specialization Led to the Balkanization of Science?” by Gavin Schmidt
–is interdisciplinary study better than specialization?

*my favorites, but they’re all very interesting

Notes:

Ch. 1 Why Aren’t Our Cities Like That?
-leaders as architects: FDR (amateur) and Jefferson vs. Louis XIV
-from the French: avenues = important diagonal streets; boulevards = broad promenades
-”With very few exceptions… we have made street corners, not plazas, into symbolic civic places.” (27) Hollywood/Vine or Times Square vs. Red Square or Piazza San Marco
-John Lukacs on American restlessness: we have street corners b/c we are mobile; we are mobile because we have a vast continent to move on in (34)

Ch 2. The Measure of a Town
-word roots: German (burg), French (bourg, ville), Latin (urbs, rus), Old English (t?n), Old French (cité), Spanish (ciudad), Italian (cittá)
-American city planner Kevin Lynch’s three conceptual models for cities: cosmic, practical, organic
-French historian Fernand Braudel’s three stages in early history of English gowns: open, closed, subjugated

Ch 3. A New, Uncrowded World
-Hispanic vs. French vs. English colonial urbanization
-The Laws of the Indies
-Native American settlements

Ch. 4 A Frenchman in New York
-Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave-Auguste de Beaumont
-de Tocqueville on democracy leaving art at the mercy of the masses (101)
-New York as commercial capital, Boston as cultural capitol, and Washington as seat of govt. “This diffusion of powers was not accidental.” (104)

Ch. 5 In the Land of the Dollar
-the word “downtown” is of American origin

Ch. 6 Civic Art
-the skyscraper—symbol of commercialism in America (144)

Ch. 7 High Hopes
-1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition
-Le Corbusier
-highway construction as Pyrrhic victory—”There was a temporary creation of construction jobs, to be sure, but the highways (usually elevated) wrought physical havoc on the established urban fabric…” (161)
-Cabrini-Green, Chicago

Ch. 8 Country Homes for City People
-city vs. suburb

Ch. 9 The New Downtown
-the rise of malls
-private property/public space
-supermarkets (due to cars)

Ch. 10 The Best of Both Worlds

“To create a space that never existed is what interests me.” — architect Daniel Libeskind (on TED Talks, shown here)

“I’ve come to the conclusion that men don’t make history, I think history makes personalities.” — novelist Joseph Heller (in this interview [youtube clip]) (This clip also contains some interesting (moreso in hindsight) commentary about John Kennedy’s election over Richard Nixon)

“And one of the first things they did was they tried to take the comics page as is and transplant it to monitors, which is a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology.” — cartoonist Scott McCloud (on TED Talks here)

Today I was thinking about how I like the word “teleological”—directed towards an end result. (Teleology is then the study of purpose or design.) That thought passed as I remembered I wanted to look up baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) to figure out chemically why it’s just so ubiquitously useful. I got distracted from that goal when I discovered that baking soda is actually an ingredient in some baking powder, which reminded me that in kindergarten our teacher used to add water to cornstarch and let us play with it. (This is more fun than it sounds because this mixture creates a non-Newtonian fluid. Try it.) Anyway, from there I learned that there is a medical condition where you compulsively eat  cornstarch (amylophagia), which  “can be an often-overlooked etiologic factor in gestational diabetes.”

Etiology, it turns out, is basically the opposite of teleology—it’s the study of causation or origin. Of course teleology would have a partner; I’d just never thought to look before.

Lessons: I may have ADD. I may be a nerd. Cornstarch is one of the more-fun food-related things.