Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In a tragic coda to this early story of eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was still enmeshed in the controversy over eugenics as recently as January 2019, this time through the disgraceful racist utterances of Nobel laureate James D. Watson, cofounder of the DNA double helix and one of the laboratory’s longtime fellows, whom they stripped of
... See moreClyde W. Ford • Think Black: A Memoir
Doomberg • The Other Strategic Reserve
The universally lauded Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate is a full-frontal assault on the implicit idea that biology plays virtually no role in social issues and norms. Nicholas Wade, at the time a New York Times science writer, wrote A Troublesome Inheritance about “Genes, Race and Human History.”
Michael Malice • The New Right: A Journey to the Fringe of American Politics
besides a model of cosmogenesis—the no-boundary hypothesis, for example—and a notion of evolution—Feynman’s idea of many possible histories in the landscape of string theory, for example—a key third element: observership.
Thomas Hertog • On the Origin of Time: Stephen Hawking's Final Theory
Far less renowned than the Hollywood Ten or writers like Howard Fast or Arthur Miller, David Lasser, one of the country’s first space advocates and the author of The Conquest of Space, became one of the first victims of the Red Scare.
Robert Stone • Chasing the Moon: How America Beat Russia in the Space Race
“They have hired astronomers; they have hired mathematicians; they have hired physicists; they have even hired theologists. They never even interviewed an economist.”
W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
In The Wizard and the Prophet, Lynn Margulis is indeed quoted as comparing humans to bacteria in a petri dish, warning that humanity could overrun the planet and exhaust its resources, leading to collapse. Charles C. Mann opens the book with a quote from Margulis, whom he admires as “one of the most important biologists in the last half century,” a
... See moreThe young Latin American intellectual Simón Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at
... See moreDavid McCullough • Brave Companions
that we had found in face-to-face and digital world social networks, with very similar circle sizes and essentially the same scaling ratio.