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Missed News 496
February 18, 2021
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Scandinavia
February 17, 2021
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Scandinavia is a subregion in Northern Europe, with strong historical, cultural, and linguistic ties. The term Scandinavia in local usage covers the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. The majority national languages of these three belong to the Scandinavian dialect continuum and are mutually intelligible North Germanic languages.
In English usage, Scandinavia also sometimes refers more narrowly to the Scandinavian Peninsula, or more broadly so as to include the Åland Islands, the Faroe Islands, Finland, and Iceland.
The broader definition is similar to what is locally called the Nordic countries, which also include the remote Norwegian islands of Svalbard and Jan Mayen and Greenland, a constituent country within the Kingdom of Denmark.
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An image from Scandinavia
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The science of wisdom
February 17, 2021
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Wisdom is full of paradoxes. It is one of the oldest topics in the intellectual history of humanity, and yet talking about wisdom can feel odd and disingenuous. People seem to have intuitions about who is and isn’t wise, but if you press them to define wisdom, they will hesitate. Wisdom, with its mystical qualities, sits on a pedestal, inspiring awe and trepidation, a bit of hushed reverence thrown in. It’s easy to distill wisdom’s archetypes in history (druids, Sufi sages) or popular culture (Star Wars’ Yoda, or Harry Potter’s Dumbledore), but harder to apply to the person on the street. Most people would agree that wisdom is desirable, yet what exactly is it?
It’s tempting to claim that the interest in wisdom emerged with the advent of particular Far Eastern philosophical traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, each emphasizing lives of sages and ways to make sense of one’s existence in the ever-changing world. Of course, neither the concept of sages nor the process of making sense of the world is specific to a particular school of thought – most religions and ideologies have their own sages and saints, and attempt to provide a certain worldview. The truth is, the concept of wisdom is incredibly ancient, and not unique to any specific culture or way of being.
For instance, more than 5,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, the Moon-god Nanna, the Lord of Wisdom, symbolized the sum of all other Sumerian deities’ powers, including foresight, justice, fertility, and love. Wisdom was a prominent topic in ancient Egyptian and Jewish texts and featured as a requirement in advising professions such as divinity, sorcery, or at the pharaoh’s court. In his Maxims, the ancient Egyptian vizier Ptahhotep described guidelines for sustaining social order, achieving political success, and cultivating self-control – in other words, the skills of wisdom. In the Old Testament’s Book of Ecclesiastes, where life is beyond comprehension, wisdom recognizes the limits of knowledge.
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Wisdom
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This Twist on Schrödinger’s Cat Paradox Has Major Implications for Quantum Theory
February 17, 2021
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What does it feel like to be both alive and dead?
That question irked and inspired Hungarian-American physicist Eugene Wigner in the 1960s. He was frustrated by the paradoxes arising from the vagaries of quantum mechanics—the theory governing the microscopic realm that suggests, among many other counterintuitive things, that until a quantum system is observed, it does not necessarily have definite properties. Take his fellow physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment in which a cat is trapped in a box with poison that will be released if a radioactive atom decays. Radioactivity is a quantum process, so before the box is opened, the story goes, the atom has both decayed and not decayed, leaving the unfortunate cat in limbo—a so-called superposition between life and death. But does the cat experience being in superposition?
Wigner sharpened the paradox by imagining a (human) friend of his shut in a lab, measuring a quantum system. He argued it was absurd to say his friend exists in a superposition of having seen and not seen a decay unless and until Wigner opens the lab door. “The ‘Wigner’s friend’ thought experiment shows that things can become very weird if the observer is also observed,” says Nora Tischler, a quantum physicist at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
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Credit: Getty Images.
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Missed News 495
February 17, 2021
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Essen, Germany
February 16, 2021
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Essen is the central and second-largest city of the Ruhr, the largest urban area in Germany. Its population of 583,109 makes it the tenth-largest city of Germany, as well as the fourth largest city of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. On the Ruhr and Emscher rivers, Essen geographically is part of the Rhineland and the larger Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Region. The Ruhrdeutsch regiolect spoken in the region has strong influences of both Low German (Westphalian) and Low Franconian (East Bergish).
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An image from Essen, Germany
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Surviving Weed-Out Classes in Science May Be a State of Mind
February 16, 2021
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“Look to your left, look to your right. One of you won’t be here in the next semester.”
It’s a typical lecture delivered at the start of a semester in the sciences, and one that Ainissa Ramirez remembered hearing early during her undergraduate studies at Brown University.
Now a successful materials scientist and science writer, Dr. Ramirez recalls that she was almost pushed out of pursuing a career in science because of her weed-out classes. As their name suggests, the classes are common especially in the sciences and mathematics at American universities and are designed to demarcate students who are likely to do well in a given subject from those who are not.
Those who excel in these introductory classes can proceed with completing a major on the topic if they wish. But there’s evidence that weed-out classes disproportionately hinder underrepresented groups including women as well as Black, Native American, and Hispanic people from pursuing STEM degrees.
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Credit…Simone Noronha.
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The Epigenetic Secrets Behind Dopamine, Drug Addiction and Depression
February 16, 2021
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As I opened my copy of Science at home one night, an unfamiliar word in the title of a new study caught my eye: dopaminylation. The term refers to the brain chemical dopamine’s ability, in addition to transmitting signals across synapses, to enter a cell’s nucleus and control specific genes. As I read the paper, I realized that it completely upends our understanding of genetics and drug addiction. The intense craving for addictive drugs like alcohol and cocaine may be caused by dopamine controlling genes that alter the brain circuitry underlying addiction. Intriguingly, the results also suggest an answer to why drugs that treat major depression must typically be taken for weeks before they’re effective. I was shocked by the dramatic discovery, but to really understand it, I first had to unlearn some things.
“Half of what you learned in college is wrong,” my biology professor, David Lange, once said. “Problem is, we don’t know which half.” How right he was. I was taught to scoff at Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his theory that traits acquired through life experience could be passed on to the next generation. The silly traditional example is the mama giraffe stretching her neck to reach food high in trees, resulting in baby giraffes with extra-long necks. Then biologists discovered we really can inherit traits our parents acquired in life, without any change to the DNA sequence of our genes. It’s all thanks to a process called epigenetics — a form of gene expression that can be inherited but isn’t actually part of the genetic code. This is where it turns out that brain chemicals like dopamine play a role.
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James O’Brien for Quanta Magazine
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Missed News 494
February 16, 2021
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Pointe De Pen-Hir Cliff Brittany
February 15, 2021
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The pointe de Pen-Hir is a promontory of the Crozon peninsula in Brittany, to the south-west of Camaret-sur-Mer. On a clear day, there are views to the Pointe du Raz and the islands of Sein and Ouessant and to Pointe Saint-Mathieu. The cliffs are as tall as 70 meters (230 ft) high.
It is the site of the Monument to the Bretons of Free France, known as the Cross of Pen-Hir and inaugurated by General Charles de Gaulle in 1960. It is intended to bear witness to the group of Free French Bretons who founded Sao Breiz in Great Britain during the Second World War. It was created in 1949-1951 by architect Jean-Baptiste Mathon and sculptor Victor-François Bazin
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An image from Pointe De Pen-Hir Cliff Brittany
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