The Art of Tetman Callis

“In most times, places, and stages of development, people’s abilities in arithmetic consist of the exact quantities ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many,’ and an ability to estimate larger amounts approximately. Their intuitive physics corresponds to the medieval theory of impetus rather than to Newtonian mechanics (to say nothing of relativity or quantum theory). Their intuitive biology […]

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“Roads are not passive; they have instrumentality and agency because they direct us – they give us our limits – even when we stray from them.” – Mary Carruthers, “The concept of ductus” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Children are not invariably conservative, but show conservative tendencies.” – Jess Gropen, et al., “The Learnability and Acquisition of the Dative Alternation in English” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“I had always been impressed by the fact that there are a surprising number of individuals who never use their minds if they can avoid it, and an equal number who do use their minds, but in an amazingly stupid way. I was also surprised to find many intelligent and wide awake people who lived […]

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“A sane and normal society is one in which people habitually disagree, because general agreement is relatively rare outside the sphere of instinctive human qualities.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The attitude of modern civilized man sometimes reminds me of a psychotic patient in my clinic who was himself a doctor. One morning I asked him how he was. He replied that he had had a wonderful night disinfecting the whole of heaven with mercuric chloride, but that in the course of this thoroughgoing sanitary […]

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“The two fundamental points in dealing with dreams are these: First, the dream should be treated as a fact, about which one must make no previous assumption except that it somehow makes sense; and second, the dream is a specific expression of the unconscious.” – Carl G. Jung, “Approaching the unconsciousness” Share this… Facebook Pinterest […]

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“The main problem facing any kind of studies on solifuges is the keeping of these animals in captivity. So far, nobody has successfully reared them in a laboratory. It is even difficult to keep them a short time (e.g., two weeks) in captivity. Most of the Namibian species died after a couple of days after […]

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“As one passes through the levels of incarceration—from the minimum to the moderate to the maximum security institutions, and then to the solitary confinement section of these institutions—one does not pass deeper and deeper into a subpopulation of the most ruthlessly calculating criminals. Instead, ironically and tragically, one comes full circle back to those who […]

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“One of saddest lessons in history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.” – Carl Sagan, The Demon […]

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“Should a mouse that a cat just swallowed be considered as a part of the cat? The concept of a ‘definite position’ is also only approximately defined: how far should a cat be displaced in order for it to be considered to be in a different position? If the displacement is much smaller than the […]

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“It is consoling to think that the emotions that music arouses in us have something to do with the makeup of the universe.” – David P. Goldman, “The Divine Music of Mathematics” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“It is evident that there is considerable operator bias introduced in designing fuzzy networks. This may not be satisfactory for complex problems where the actual relationships are not understood to begin with.” – H. K. D. H. Bhadeshia, “Neural Networks in Materials Science” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“A glass is a nonequilibrium state of matter between that of a solid and a liquid. It is a non-crystalline amorphous solid that has a nanoscopically and microscopically disordered structure but many of the mechanical properties of a solid. Glass is a nonequilibrium, non-crystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short time scale […]

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“Solid ice is stable to over 200 GPa and 4400 K in a body-centered cubic structure, near the melt boundary in water-rich Neptune-like planets. This may be responsible for the increased electrical conductivity that may promote the generation of multipolar magnetic fields. Due to the fluidity of the protons in Ice XVIII, and in contrast […]

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“Although the cosmological constant cold dark matter model is very successful in explaining almost all observations, it has some theoretical issues within its backbone structure. These include the mysterious physical origin of the two largest contributions to the energy content of the late-time Universe: cold dark matter and the cosmological constant, together with the unsatisfactory […]

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“Although representations of traumatic events (such as flashbulb memories) are not wholly immune to error and distortion, evidence suggests that negative and stressful experiences lead to a reduction of the structural plasticity. This may support the idea that the normal function of memory is to form constructive, plastic memories since, in cases of traumatic memories, […]

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“The fact that episodic memory is fragmentary and fragile suggests that its adaptiveness may derive less from its role as an accurate record of personal history than from providing a ‘vocabulary’ from which to construct planned future events (and perhaps to embellish events of the past). It may be part of a more general toolbox […]

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“Memory is not only about the past, but is also about the future. Indeed, while memory serves as the ability to recall previous experiences, recall itself is not solely directed toward the past, but is guided by the present for the service of the future.” – Tzofit Ofengenden, “Memory Formation and Belief” Share this… Facebook […]

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“The fact that memory involves a constructive process of piecing together fragmentary information (rather than something more akin to a direct replay of the past) raises the hypothesis that a veridical representation of the past is not the optimal functioning of human memory system. This raises further questions about whether memory may have other roles […]

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“Memory, especially autobiographical memory, is a dynamic entity that perpetually changes. Autobiographical memories are vulnerable to multiple influences and prone to distortions and deceptions; they are never constant and never result in fully accurate representations. At the same time, however, these changes occur without us being aware of them. Even so, we still attribute belief […]

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“The findings of science entail that the belief systems of all the world’s traditional religions and cultures—their theories of the origins of life, humans, and societies—are factually mistaken. We know, but our ancestors did not, that humans belong to a single species of African primate that developed agriculture, government, and writing late in its history. […]

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“Only in a vague way can we conceive the character of ant-society, and the nature of ant-morality; and to do even this we must try to imagine some yet impossible state of human society and human morals. Let us, then, imagine a world full of people incessantly and furiously working,—all of whom seem to be […]

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“Mathematics cannot be defined without acknowledging its most obvious feature: namely, that it is interesting.” – Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and that there is no rational explanation for it.” – Eugene Wigner, “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty, a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.” – Bertrand […]

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“A blind musician once claimed that he could detect a hundred different sounds made by cats. Scientists, studying many hours of tape recordings, also insist that the feline vocal repertoire is huge—the most complex of any animal except Homo sapiens.” – Desmond Morris, Catlore Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“There is no finer sight on green Earth than a defeated bully.” – Edward O. Wilson, “A Magic Kingdom” Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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“The universe, the real universe, might actually be much, much larger than the part we see today, because the velocity of light is finite and therefore we cannot look infinitely far. By looking into the sky with a telescope, we can only see as far as light can have travelled since the beginning of the […]

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“The knowledge we have creates the new questions we must ask.” – Johann Rafelski, The Structured Vacuum: Thinking About Nothing Share this… Facebook Pinterest Twitter Linkedin Email Print

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