Tag: thinking
-
Darwin and his garden. Socrates and Athens. Einstein at a desk.
While tropical plants played an important part in Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, with hundreds of floral specimens collected, his own country garden yielded many of the answers needed to understand natural selection in plants. (1) Socrates generated the most elevated philosophy of his time without leaving his home town of Athens. Darwin came up…
-
Application before the theory… Living without knowing…
A new discovery explains what happens during the phase transition in Dirac materials, paving the way for engineering advanced electronics that perform significantly faster. (1) The dogma that theory should precede practical applications is a very persistent one. We are all affected by it. But remember: the biggest practical applications of modern days science are…
-
Keeping on finding problems… Squirrels dying…
Why do many problems in life seem to stubbornly stick around, no matter how hard people work to fix them? It turns out that a quirk in the way human brains process information means that when something becomes rare, we sometimes see it in more places than ever. (1) Stop thinking for a minute. Imagine…
-
The problem of problems…
The problem with solving problems. You are always changing your view on the problem as time passes by. So much that sometimes you do not realize that you have solved the problem. (1) We spend all our lives in solving problems. At work. At our personal relationships. Everywhere. But why try to solve problems in…
-
Improved (useless) algorithms…
Scientists being enthusiastic about improving computers to solve problems faster. (1) At the end we will make computers which will solve all problems at once. And yet. Every problem-solving method entails an important drawback we always tend to forget: that it takes the existence of the problem for granted in the first place… Imagine a…
You must be logged in to post a comment.