Science – Craig Constantine

I had to create a Docent →

Published 27 Days Ago · All posts on Aug 17 · Cogitants

This is simply how my mind works. If I see a problem or a sharp edge which interests or annoys me… I get “distracted” (I argue that these distractions are actually the real things that I get done) and I go build, fix, repair, or remove entirely . . .

So I started something tiny for myself and it has just grown into — well, I had to create a Docent so when people ask me questions it can explain it in a way that I can’t. So imagine you and I are in a small museum and I brought you in through the employee entrance in the back and I just finished babbling at you about how it all works. So I can say, “…wait, I’m sorry. We have a Docent who can translate my crazy for you . . .”

At which point I woke up the Docent and prompted it with:

Good morning! I have a guest with me who asked me, “what is this project?!” (they’re shocked at its actual scale, confused by the complexity of the room, and don’t understand why the effort…)
~ Me

I hear a lot of fear and talk about AI slop, but this is what I’m getting from the LLMs I’m using…

(more…)

Can you explain it? →

Published January 14, 2025 · All posts on Jan 14

Physicist and science communicator Richard Feynman came up with another criterion, one that applies directly to the non-scientist likely to be bamboozled by fancy terminology that sounds scientific. […] Rather than asking lay people to confront scientific-sounding claims on their own terms, Feynman would have us translate them into ordinary language, thereby assuring that what the claim asserts is a logical concept, rather than just a collection of jargon.
~ from Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From Pseudoscience (1966)

Elsewhere, this is 4uoeri1. — slipbox

Confronting scientific-sounding things on your own terms is actually very difficult. What he’s described is not meant to be a way to decide if something is true—that’s much harder. He’s giving you a tool for quickly spotting scientific-sounding rubbish.

Not me, I’m certain →

Published April 5, 2024 · All posts on Apr 5 · 7 for Sunday

Three words matter much: Not me, I’m certain I am uncertain. I’m not simply uncertain. Not simply indecisive, beset by unknowns, nor stymied by possibilities.

The virtue of intellectual humility is getting a lot of attention. It’s heralded as a part of wisdom, an aid to self-improvement and a catalyst for more productive political dialogue. While researchers define intellectual humility in various ways, the core of the idea is “recognizing that one’s beliefs and opinions might be incorrect.”
But achieving intellectual humility is hard. Overconfidence is a persistent problem, faced by many, and does not appear to be improved by education or expertise. Even scientific pioneers can sometimes lack this valuable trait.
~ Michael Dickson from, Intellectual humility is a key ingredient for scientific progress

Elsewhere, this is 4uteie8. — slipbox

The compass for me is, “so what?” When I’m certain of something, I ask myself: So, what? Connecting that which I’m certain of, out into the world via, “so, what?” challenges me to look at the underpinnings of my beliefs, and the integration with my knowledge in total.

Discovery →

Published May 17, 2023 · All posts on May 17 · Quotes

What people think of as the moment of discovery is really the discovery of the question.
~ Jonas Salk

Elsewhere, this is 4a1159. — slipbox

A cure for hiccups →

Published February 22, 2023 · All posts on Feb 22 · 7 for Sunday

[It] boils down to a simple breathing exercise. First, exhale completely, then inhale a deep breath. Wait 10 seconds, then—without exhaling—inhale a little more. Wait another five seconds, then top up the breath again. Finally, exhale.
~ Uri Bram from, The Cure for Hiccups Exists

Elsewhere, this is 4uteie9. — slipbox

Sometimes I straight-up do public service announcements. Here, have a cure for hiccups!

If you’ve thought about how proper breathing works, you’ll quickly realize those instructions involve incrementally, increasingly flexing your diaphragm muscle. (If that isn’t obvious, the Thoracic diaphragm page on Wikipedia has you covered.) The muscle spasm is part of a feedback loop involving two of our nerves, and intentionally activating the muscle breaks that feedback. The trick is that you need to really flex it… flex it much harder than you normally do when breathing.

Note that if you do the “hold your breath” part of the exercise by closing your glottis (what’s that?) and relaxing your diaphragm, you’re doing it wrong. The entire point of the exercise is to flex, flex, flex and hold tension in the diaphragm muscle.

The gap →

Published January 22, 2023 · All posts on Jan 22 · Creativity, 7 for Sunday

The Wrights’ story shows something more common than we realize: There’s often a big gap between changing the world and convincing people that you changed the world.
~ Morgan Housel, from When You Change the World and No One Notices

Elsewhere, this is 4ucobo12. — slipbox

On one hand, we could simply define “changed the world” to be when people have actually noticed, or when the change is wide-spread. On the other hand, it’d be much more interesting to acknowledge that the change happens at the moment of the advance—the moment the Wright Brothers figured out controlled, powered flight. (It’s the “controlled” part that really made them first.) The challenge for us creatives… for those of us out trying to change the world… is how do we act during the gap. Do we keep working, quietly changing the world further? Do we stop working and start marketing? Or… something else? To quote William Gibson: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Forget glowing noses →

Published January 16, 2023 · All posts on Jan 16 · 7 for Sunday

During the summer, when the sun spends months above the horizon, the inner parts of the animals’ eyes, a structure called the tapetum lucidum, gleam a shimmering gold. But as the landscape dips into the perpetual darkness of winter, their eyes turn a rich blue.
~ Katherine J. Wu, from Twice a Year, Reindeer Eyes Pull Off a Wonderful Magic Trick

Elsewhere, this is 4utesi1. — slipbox

Forget glowing noses; reindeer eyes are magic. This is a short, punchy, pop-sci article— and is exactly the sort of random, interesting thing I delight in trawling through RSS feeds to locate.

Titan →

Published October 26, 2022 · All posts on Oct 26 · 7 for Sunday

Titan is like Earth with its rivers, lakes, and seas filled by rain, but as stated, this is liquid methane and ethane as opposed to liquid water on Earth. Like Earth, Titan also has sand dunes, but they are made of hydrocarbons instead of silicate-based substances. Also, much like Earth, Titan is known for having a seasonal liquid transport cycle, also known as the water cycle on Earth, linking atmosphere, land, and oceans.
~ Laurence Tognetti from, Titan is an Alien World, but Surprisingly Familiar – Universe Today

Elsewhere, this is 4uuiti1. — slipbox

Back in the 1980s I read a lot of science fiction weaving epic tales and describing alien landscapes. These days, I continue to read things which are weaving epic, and describing alien—but they are no longer fiction.

Logical conclusions →

Published September 22, 2022 · All posts on Sep 22 · Cogitants

In its original Latin use, the word genius was more readily applied to places — genius loci: “the spirit of a place” — than to persons, encoded with the reminder that we are profoundly shaped by the patch of spacetime into which the chance-accident of our birth has deposited us, our minds porous to the ideological atmosphere of our epoch. It is a humbling notion — an antidote to the vanity of seeing our ideas as the autonomous and unalloyed products of our own minds.
~ Maria Popova from, Darwin Among the Machines: A Victorian Visionary’s Prophetic Admonition for Saving Ourselves from Enslavement by Artificial Intelligence – The Marginalian

Elsewhere, this is 4utesa2. — slipbox

This is a delightful meander across time and authors.

That’s… interesting →

Published September 12, 2022 · All posts on Sep 12

But in our Physics Project we’ve developed a fundamentally different view of space—in which space is not just a background, but has its own elaborate composition and structure. And in fact, we posit that space is in a sense everything that exists, and that all “things” are ultimately just features of the structure of space. We imagine that at the lowest level, space consists of large numbers of abstract “atoms of space” connected in a hypergraph that’s continually getting updated according to definite rules and that’s a huge version of something like this…
~ Stephen Wolfram from, On the Concept of Motion—Stephen Wolfram Writings

Elsewhere, this is 4useoe1. — slipbox

I’m not sure what to say about this. I am certain that Wolfram is not crazy and that he is brilliant, but he’s pretty far beyond what I can understand. (Picture me doing that slightly askew, squinting thing.) On the other hand, if they really are making the progress they seem to be… it’s going to be a neat time to be alive, in another decade when they get things sorted out.