The History of Fishes

Halley's traumas were not yet quite over. The Royal Society had promised to publish the work, but now pulled out, citing financial embarrassment. The year before the society had backed a costly flop called The History of Fishes, and they now suspected that the market for a book on mathematical principles would be less than clamorous. Halley, whose means were not great, paid for the book's publication out of his own pocket. Newton, as was his custom, contributed nothing. To make matters worse, Halley at this time had just accepted a position as the society's clerk, and he was informed that the society could no longer afford to provide him with a promised salary of £50 per annum. He was to be paid instead in copies of The History of Fishes.

- from A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, 49.

Punching my sister

"In 1964, 300 years after he made his mark on the world, a page in one of his [Isaac Newton] notebooks, penned cryptically in 1662, was finally decoded; on it, addressed to God, was a list of sins 19-year old Newton had committed."

Some selections:

2. Eating an apple at Thy house
3. Making a feather while on Thy day
4. Denying that I made it
14. Wishing death and hoping it to some
15. Striking many
16. Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese
17. Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer
18. Denying that I did so
24. Punching my sister
25. Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugars
26. Calling Derothy Rose a jade
44. Beating Arthur Storer


- from Lists of Note, ed. Shaun Usher

I cannot call it a nightmare....

"I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep. But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat. It appeared to me about four or five feet long, for it measured fully the length of the hearth-rug as it passed over it; and it continued to-ing and fro-ing with the lithe sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes..."


- from "Carmilla," J. Sheridan Le Fanu, 1872

An unsettling article claims that "A startup company has now launched the first clinical trial in the United States to test the anti-aging benefits of young blood."

Link here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/08/young-blood-antiaging-trial-raises-questions

Like the Dirac equation

"Roughly speaking, the scientist tries to name things and the artist tries to avoid naming things. ... The novelist...doesn't want to clarify and distill the meaning of [a concept such as] love so that there is only a single meaning, like the Dirac equation, because no such distillation exists. And any attempt at such a distillation would undermine the authenticity of readers' reactions, destroying the delicate, participatory creative experience of a good reader reading a good book. In a sense, a novel is not complete until it has been read. And each reader completes the novel in a different way."

- Alan Lightman, "Words," A Sense of the Mysterious.

"Furthermore, intelligence is an incredibly plastic property of the brain. You can nurture it or you can squelch it — the marching morons will birth children with as much potential as a pair of science-fiction geeks, and all that will matter is how well that mind is encouraged to grow. Even a few centuries is not enough to breed stupidity into a natural population of humans — that brain power may lay fallow and undernourished, but there isn’t enough time nor enough pressure to make substantial changes in the overall genetics of the brain....

Here’s the real solution to the “marching moron” problem: teach them. Give them fair opportunities. Open the door to education for all. They have just as much potential as you do. Bova complains that people aren’t willing to work for change, but this is exactly where we can work to improve minds — but we won’t if we assume the mob is hopeless."

- from an article in ScienceBlogs by P.Z. Myers, answering C.M. Kornbluth's story "The Marching Morons", 1951. 

This Sublunary Maze

"Copernicus, Atlas his successor, is of opinion the earth is a planet, moves and shines to others, as the moon doth to us. Digges, Gilbert, Keplerus, Origanus, and others, defend this hypothesis of his in sober sadness, and that the moon is inhabited: if it be so that the earth is a moon, then are we also giddy, vertiginous and lunatic within this sublunary maze."

 - Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621.

"So from now on history will be a matter of necessary adjustments to Earth’s biophysical reality. We will be deploying ever-more powerful technologies, and we may get better at understanding our problems and addressing them. We could very possibly build a sustainable civilization that shares the planet with the other animals, and gives all humans alive a chance at a fulfilled existence. This is what the combination of justice and science working on physical reality could do, if we were to successfully shove history that way.

So two possibilities exist at once and are in a kind of awful race: utopia or catastrophe are both possible from our current moment. The thing is, the catastrophes will be wide-ranging but not universal, and will play out over decades and centuries, and in those same decades we will be struggling to accommodate to whatever situation exists, to make the best of it, and even to make it better. So there will be an ongoing struggle."

- Kim Stanley Robinson, from this interview.

Venter: We're much more genetically determined in terms of our physiology. We have 200 trillion cells, and the outcome of each of them is almost 100 percent genetically determined. And that's what our experiment with the first synthetic genome proves, at least in the case of really simple bacteria. It's the interactions of all those separate genetic units that give us the physiology that we see.

Goetz: So on a cellular level, since the genes control the function of the cell, no matter what happens in that cell's environment, we're more the product of our genes than our environment.

Venter: Yes.

- from this interview with Craig Venter

"Two people who are unable to move their limbs have been able to guide a robot arm to reach and grasp objects using only their brain activity, a paper in Nature reports today."

- From this paper in Nature.

"All that science has done is given man a dozen new sets of eyes --- and that makes it a great deal worse. For instance, there's the germ (if it is a germ) that is always swimming just outside the edge of the brightly lighted field of the microscope, that eludes even the electronic microscope. There's the planet (if it is a planet and not some vast black sentient thing poised above the earth) that is seen out of the corner of the telescope's eye. There's the radar echo that doesn't  seem to be coming quite from the moon, but somewhere else. There are the atomic glows that aren't just what the nuclear physicist expected. There's the buried thought that the psychologist can never quite reach, not even when he employs the hypno-analytic technique which can dredge up memories of events that occurred when the patient was six months old. (And is the buried thought a human thought, or a demon's?)....

- Fritz Leiber, from Weird Tales, 1946.

Thanks Fritz. Likewise, there's this underwater frequency that scientists can't quite place.