To continue with a posting trend we started a couple days ago, I wanted to recommend a terrific book called Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison, originally published in 1982 by scientific American Library. [It appears that new…
Ok, here's another site that shows what tiny (yet interesting) specks of almost-nothing we humans are. But it does such a good job of it! Check it out.
My city (St. Louis) is still covered with traffic-clogging snow needing to be hefted from sidewalks. I was glad that I happened onto these photos to remind me what is really going on out there. As in the previous post about the Hubble photos, the human eye gets such a…
This is a six-minute video of several of the Hubble telescope's great accomplishments. Who said scientists can't be inspirational? [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcBV-cXVWFw[/youtube]
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …
