The Great Geek Manual

Scientia means “knowledge:” science, it seems to me, is not about facts; it is about thinking about facts. Equally, poetry might or might not be driven by feeling but what it is “about” is relationships – between word and sound, word and thing, word and thought, sound and meaning, words and other words. So is science. Darwin wondered constantly about the relationships of organic forms – in earth, in stone, in what happens between red clover and bumble bees, orchid and moth. The deepest thing science and poetry share, perhaps, is the way they can tolerate uncertainty. They have a modesty in common: they do not have to say they’re right. True, perhaps. Or just truer. “A scientist should be the first to say he doesn’t know. A scientist goes forward towards truth but never gets there.

- “The science of poetry, the poetry of science” by Ruth Padel, December 9, 2011.
Originally published by The Guardian.

At Christmas
A man is at his finest towards the finish of the year;
He is almost what he should be when the Christmas season’s here;
Then he’s thinking more of others than he’s thought the months before,
And the laughter of his children is a joy worth toiling for.
He is less a selfish creature than at any other time;
When the Christmas spirit rules him he comes close to the sublime…

- Edgar Guest

When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns.

- Marshall McLuhan, as quoted in Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work! by Douglas Coupland, 2011.

Natural selection is a way of sorting among a range of genetic alternatives, and finding the best one. Social learning is a way of sifting among a range of alternative options or ideas, and choosing the best one of those. And so, we see a direct comparison between social learning driving idea evolution, by selecting the best ideas —we copy people that we think are successful, we copy good ideas, and we try to improve upon them — and natural selection, driving genetic evolution within societies, or within populations. I think this analogy needs to be taken very seriously, because just as natural selection has acted on genetic populations, and sculpted them, we’ll see how social learning has acted on human populations and sculpted them.

… social learning may have set up a situation in humans where, over the last 200,000 years or so, we have been selected to be very, very good at copying other people, rather than innovating on our own. We like to think we’re a highly inventive, innovative species. But social learning means that most of us can make use of what other people do, and not have to invest the time and energy in innovation ourselves. That’s one consequence of social learning, that it has sculpted us to be very shrewd and intelligent at copying, but perhaps less shrewd at innovation and creativity than we’d like to think. Few of us are as creative as we’d like to think we are.

- “Infinite Stupidity” by Mark Pagel, December 15, 2011.
First posted to Edge.org.

The self is not a thing but a process.

- The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger, 2009.

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

- What Is Life? by Lynn Margulis, 2000.

“The scientific method,” Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, “is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.” That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in corrrecting its mistakes.

Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry—is not even a “subject”—but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.”

- The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School by Neil Postman, 1996.

Our children no longer want to become physicists and astronauts. They want to invent the next Facebook instead. Short of that, they are happy to land a job at Google. They don’t talk quanta — they dream bits. They don’t see entanglement but recognize with ease nodes and links. As complexity takes a driving seat in science, engineering and business, we physicists cannot afford to sit on the sidelines.

- “The network takeover” by Albert-László Barabási.
Originally published in

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The Internet allows us to do all kinds of things we never imagined possible. It lets us communicate with people across the world. We can learn whatever we want at the click of a button. We can navigate roads using our iPhones, and translate languages within seconds. It makes us smarter, and more versatile, and faster than ever. But the Web isn’t just a truly extraordinary invention, it is the apex of human evolution — and the ultimate evolutionary adaptation.

- “The Internet: Triumph of human evolution” by Thomas Rogers, December 4, 2011.