How do you learn about things?
-
Experience: things you do, or things
that happen to you.
Your observations.
-
Primary sources: you heard about it from
someone who experienced it. "We performed the following
experiment." Scientific articles; investigative journalism;
diaries; transcribed interviews.
Someone else's observations.
-
Secondary sources: you hear summaries or
distillations of primary sources, without reference to the
authors' own experience. "An article in this week's Journal of
Scientific Spiffiness reports …." Science journalism;
unbiased but non-investigative reporting.
Someone's reports of someone else's
observations.
-
Tertiary sources: you hear distillations
of secondary sources, without direct reference to any primary
sources. "The Associated Press reports that scientists
have …."
Based, in principle, on someone else's
observations.
Of course these categories are pretty fuzzy. So, some fuzzy
questions:
-
How much of what you know, and care about knowing, comes from each
category?
-
How much weight do you attach to new information from each
category?
-
How good are you at telling one source of information from
another?
My goal here is to publish questions every day, and essays once a
week.
So far (March 2009, about six months after starting)
it's been more like a question a week and an essay a month.
Recent questions
[none]
Older questions
In a letter to Physics Today
Roger
Musson writes
that the terms "Stone Age," "Iron Age," etc. refer
to the material used most commonly to construct knives.
This means we are currently in the Stainless Steel Age,
possibly changing to the Plastic Age.
By some reasonable measure, when would the transition happen?
2009-05-28 Thursday 17:37:37
Venoms have evolved independently in several different
vertebrate lineages: in snakes and lizards, and in
the platypus, and in one other mammal.
What are the transitional stages for venom to appear?
How would the appearance go in, say, a population of people?
2009-04-01 Wednesday 17:41:46
A stopped clock is exactly right twice a day.
With some error-weighted averages, a stopped clock is
more
accurate on average than a clock running, say, ten minutes fast.
What averages do and don't have this property?
2008-11-19 Wednesday 23:40:45
Supposedly volcanism on Io is caused (or enhanced) by tidal heating
from Jupiter. What power does tidal heating dissipate in the
Earth-Moon system?
2008-10-23 Thursday 13:03:59
What makes glassy smooth patches on the surface of a larger body of
water? Why are the patches partially stable against rippling from
outside?
2008-10-23 Thursday 06:05:41
How strong is the correlation between income tax witholding /
refunding and tolerance for government spending?
2008-10-14 Tuesday 23:05:05
You can't interact with a physical system without disturbing
it, though you can ignore the disturbance in the limit where
ħ is small. Similarly, you can't interact with a market
for some product (by asking or buying or offering or selling)
without affecting the "market price" seen by others, but
you can neglect that change unless your exchanges comprise a large
fraction of the market. There is some correspondence here. Clearly
it'd be easy to take this correspondence as justification for
saying some really dumb things. Are there any useful insights
there?
2008-09-26 Friday 14:50:23
What's the pressure inside an unopened soda bottle (or can)?
What's the rate at which CO
2 comes out of solution
at ambient pressure? How much does the bubbling change the
temperature of the liquid?
2008-09-23 Tuesday 19:19:09