The Trivium Method is a methodology of learning how to learn and learning how to think, much like other methodologies such as the scientific method. Trivium means three paths or ways, or the place where three roads meet.
tag > Science
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Future men will look back on our epoch as a age of darkness
"If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call "schizophrenia" was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds." - R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 107
Related: Tom Shandel & Kirk Tougas‘ 1989 documentary, Did You Used To Be R.D.Laing?, made shortly after Laing’s death. (via)
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Elite Networks: Illuminati Org-Chart
#Cryptocracy #Philosophy #Comedy #Economics #Politics #Military #Science #fnord
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Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research
Dr. Cristin Kearns uncovered papers showing the sugar industry secretly funded Harvard research downplaying role of sugar in heart disease - fingering dietary fat instead.
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Robert Anton Wilson interviews David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist
Bohm: "If you take a holistic view and try to apply it everywhere and refuse to think of any alternative, you will make mistakes. In fact, it was the mistakes of the medieval holists that led to the rebellion against them and the rise of mechanistic philosophy in Bacon and Newton. Now I think we see again in our time that the limitations of the mechanistic view are becoming obvious, so we need a new development of holism again. But the problem is never in any particular model per se. The problem is that models are thought, and thought is the past and can prevent us from fresh thinking now. No model is equal to the whole universe, because the only thing equal to the whole universe is the whole universe. No thought can grasp the whole, because thought is a part, not the whole. So we need to use each model where it is useful and replace it, without regret, when it is no longer useful." [...] "However, my best guess is that as we go along we will see more and more that these models are not mutually exclusive. We will see, I think, that the universe is like music, and that there are always at least two themes interwoven."
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Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real
Google's quantum computing team in collaboration with physicists say they have demonstrated a genuine time crystal for the first time. Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer.
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A Soil-Science Revolution Upends Plans to Fight Climate Change (quantamagazine)
#Comment: Once again a case where the scientific community is finally admitting that they have been terribly off-track for centuries - a fact practitioners pointed out all along. Science is good at many things, but practicing humility, listening, inclusivity and general respect for Nature are not among them.
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The biomass distribution on Earth
This cool paper estimates the total biomass on earth. Animals constitute 2Gt of carbon. (1 Gt=1e15 g) This is mostly marine arthropods (1 Gt) and fish (0.7 Gt). Humans just 0.06 Gt. For comparison, plants are 450 Gt.
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What does the square root of minus 1 and fairies have in common?
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The made-up African mountains: A historic case highlighting the dangers of abstraction
In 1798, the English cartographer James Rennell invented a high mountain range thousands of kilometers long and drew it on a new map of Africa: the Kong Mountains. The story is completely absurd, but you can also learn something from phantom mountains.
Rennell was considered a great geographical authority of the British Age of Discovery. When he drew maps for the travelogue of the Scottish explorer Mungo Park (1796) and located a large new mountain range on them, no one had any reason to doubt their existence.
So one cartographer after the other took over the knowledge of the new mountains. They appear in at least 40 maps between 1798 and 1892, and they got bigger and bigger (above: 1805, here: 1839). All on the basis of a remark by Park that he had seen 2 or 3 peaks.
From 1830 the course of the Niger was known and it was known that the mountains could not exist like this. Nevertheless, it took L.-G. Binger in 1889 (he didn't even find a range of hills) until the Kong Mountains finally began to disappear from the maps.
And even then they continued to lead a shadowy existence as a cartographic phantom for quite a while: The Kong Mountains can be found in the index of the Oxford Advanced Atlas from 1928 and even in an edition of Goode's Atlas from 1995.
The anecdote nicely illustrates how it can work with the transmission of knowledge in science: belief in authority plus "facts" assumption without own examination and a dose of ignorance. That is definitely not the rule, but one is not sure about it today either.
Found in: Simon Garfield, On The Map: Why the world looks the way it does, 2012, Chapter 11.
Also of interest: Ken Jennings, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks, 2012.
(via)
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"She Blinded Me With Science" is a fitting motto for our times (and a fun tune by Thomas Dolby)
Prediction: After all is set and done with the current global "ordo ad chao" terror campaign, science - the leading institutions of post-"enlightenment" humanity - will widely be perceived as a morally bankrupt, failed enterprise. Calls for the separation of state and science and something akin to Nuremberg trials 2.0 will get much louder - accelerating the implosion of the established scientific system. Just to be clear, I am not referring to the idealized fantasy version of science that people tirelessly praise (the scientific method, skeptical inquiry, etc.), but science as it is practiced in actuality today (Global domination by a few western colonial elite universities and corporations. An epic reproducibility crisis. A cult of gate-keepers and closed-sourced "sacred knowledge". Massive corruption and privatization on all levels. Money buys any scientific "truth", "credibility" and personnel. Militarization of most scientific domains. Dreadful moral/ethical track-record. Out of touch with the needs of people. Et cetera.)
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“I guess every man loves Occam’s razor until it’s time to shave his balls.” - Tyson Yunkaporta
