The Aesthetics and Beauty of Knowledge
Shih was the opposite of facts and raw information; shih was the elegance of knowledge, the insight and skill to organize knowledge into meaningful patterns. As an artist chooses colours or light to make her pictures, a master of shih chooses textures of knowledge – various ideas, myths, abstractions, and theories – to create a way of seeing the world. The aesthetics and beauty of knowledge – this was shih.
– David Zindell, The Broken God, 1993
Geek Attitude
The attitude thing is about flexibility, portability, creativity, sociability and jamming (ran out of suitable “ity” words!). It’s about improvising – in the practical and musical senses of the word; not getting tangled in boundaries and the “right” way to do things.
Definitely the only way to travel.
– Martin Delaney – “Laptop Music”.
Kuehleborn's Unfathomable Thoughts
Connotea is closing
Connotea, nature.com’s social bookmarking site, is closing on March 12th, 2013. Bad News? I don’t think so, because there are a lot of bookmarking tools, and the world of the internet is changing rapidly. So: in the beginning you simply bookmarked inside your browser. AFAIK you can still do that with most browsers, but who […]
Earth-Size Alien Planet at Alpha Centauri in Science Fiction.
This week the discovery of the closest earth-like exoplanet ever seen was announced. The star system closest to our own sun hosts a planet with roughly Earth’s mass and may harbor other alien worlds as well, a new study reports. Astronomers detected the alien planet around the sunlike star Alpha Centauri B, which is part […]
Why are online articles so expensive?
George Dvorsky wrote an article for io9.com: did life on other planets originate from earth? He describes the study by Edward Belbruno, Amaya Moro-Martin, Renu Malhotra, Dmitry Savransky: “Chaotic exchange of solid material between planetary systems: implications for lithopanspermia” I’m not sure about the soundness of the conclusion (the possibility of lithopanspermia, a kind of […]
BrainBuilding with Khanacademy
I’m one of the >85,000 subscribers worldwide for the Artificial Intelligence Class taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig. Great, but not special, since at least 84,999 other people did that too. I’ll only be proud when I finished the course, because it troubles me if my math skills are still up-to-date – I left […]
Roger Penrose’s Road to Reality
A few weeks ago I was in London for a short vacation. Being there wih my wife and daughters there was a lot of shopping on the programm and of course we had to visit Harrod’s. While the ladies were just browsing the goodies that were way too expensive for them, I was in the […]
Wired Science: Top Scientific Breakthroughs of 2009
Wired has published their top-10 list of favourite scientific breakthroughs of 2009. With so many incredible scientific advances and discoveries this year, Wired Science had a tough time choosing which 10 were the biggest. So, we went with the ones that stood out for us. From the amazing collective power of jellyfish, to a new […]