In The Golden Compass, Dust permeates the world. It is created by consciousness and is itself conscious, and can condense into angels. Blockchain is not like that.
Lifehack
Cross-posting my comment on Scott’s adult neurogenesis post:
I may just be misreading something, but it seems to me like your Part II here goes a lot further in its claims that any of the sources you link to.
Well, okay, the Neuroskeptic posts make it sound like the author is pretty convinced by the no-human-adult-neurogenesis side of the argument, but the Atlantic article makes it sound much more like there are just a lot of conflicting results, with a lot of researchers who will argue vociferously for their preferred interpretation but who will also admit that when it comes down to it, there just isn’t enough data (or good enough experimental methodology) and more research is needed – which is a very common situation in science, even in the hard sciences, and isn’t any kind of crisis.
That is also the impression I get from this post by Jason Synder, which Neuroskeptic described as “excellent.” Synder says things like:
In 2011 I made a list of all the human studies of adult hippocampal neurogenesis (see here, may be incomplete). The pioneering study was by Eriksson et al in 1998, where they found BrdU+ cells in cancer patients. Studies such as Knoth et al and Epp et al have used endogenous markers of immature neurons (such as DCX) to identify adult neurogenesis. Lastly, Spalding et al used another complementary and creative approach to quantify adult neurogenesis: radiocarbon dating. Individually, none of these studies are entirely convincing of adult neurogenesis in humans but, collectively, they provide strong converging evidence. They convinced me. And while the new Sorrells paper raises concerns about these previous papers, it cannot definitively refute them either.
And his post has a section heading called “We need more studies of neurogenesis in humans,” describing all the complicated problems that could potentially have corrupted existing results (including the latest anti-neurogenesis ones). It definitely doesn’t sound like he thinks human adult neurogenesis is dead (if it were, we wouldn’t need more studies of it!).
Neuroskeptic sounds more convinced on that score, but I’m not clear on why. They write:
This result challenges previous studies, using other methods, that did report adult neurogenesis in the human hippocampus. However, the new study is consistent with another no-neurogenesis finding from a couple of years ago. For more on the methodology of these neurogenesis studies, see this excellent post by Jason Snyder. Overall, it seems to me that the evidence against adult neurogenesis is becoming pretty convincing.
I don’t think this is deliberately misleading, but it is easy to misread. If you don’t click through to the Synder post, it’s easy to infer from the flow of the paragraph that it provides more support for the sense that adult human neurogenesis is probably dead (in fact, it does the opposite). And then, if you ignore that sentence, the rest of the paragraph isn’t convincing at all – it amounts to “there are various studies reporting the opposite result, but there's at least one that reports the same result,” which does not in itself inspire strong confidence in the result.
The other Neuroskeptic post, about the earlier paper, presents an interpretation like the one in your post (under “entirely innocent, well-intentioned, and understandable”) – but it’s an interpretation of that one paper, and how to reconcile it with one other paper. I don’t see anyone else proposing that interpretation as a resolution of the whole dispute, and indeed, Synder and the researchers quoted in the Atlantic article all seem to think the dispute can only be truly resolved by more data and better methods.
The most extraordinary sentences, a porn of the relation, not of the act, follows from this, viz: “The two foci first elect the four cardinal sub-foci of the quadrille; these are the four who are loved in title of favoritism and unityism. Then each one elects, from fourteen loved ones, seven that are pivotal in high scale and seven in low scale. Next are elected four ambiguous in low scale; the surplus from the twelve major and the twelve minor keys, of which seven are pivotal in each octave.”
The institution of assigning names to human beings peaked on 10 October 1917 and has been on the decline ever since
(via youarenotthewalrus)
I didn’t actually know until recently that the character “Simplicio” in Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was based on the Pope, who up until that point had been Galileo’s friend and ally, and who had asked Galileo to include his own views in his book
Like, I’d be pissed off too if I asked the guy to discuss my opinions in his book, and then read the book and found them in the mouth of a character named, roughly, “Dumbass”
Wait wait wait, who told you that Simplicio was based on the pope?
(I’m guessing one of the local Catholics)
Because that’s not true, Simplicio was supposed to refer Simplicius (it’s the Italian version of the name), a big-name Aristotelian philosopher, according to Galileo. From my reading recollections and according to wiki, most historians think that Galileo did not intend the Simplicio to be a caricature of Urban or of his views.
And the character cannot make a cogent argument because there is no cogent argument supporting the Aristotelian geocentric model (or basically anything written by Aristotle ever about anything).
You’re right – Simplicio was not based on the pope, and I was in error to say that.
However, everything after the first clause in my OP I think is correct, including the part about Urban’s point being put in Simplicio’s mouth and this being understandably offensive (which is not to say the response was proportionate).
This all is supported by the sources cited in your Wikipedia link, or the two I checked, anyway. From The Sleepwalkers:
Thirdly, Urban himself made a suggestion how to get around the difficulty of arguing in favour of the Copernican system without asserting it to be true. The suggestion was this: assuming that a hypothesis explains satisfactorily certain phenomena, this does not necessarily mean that it is true, for God is all-powerful and may have produced the said phenomena by some entirely different means which are not understood by the human mind. This suggestion of Urban’s, on which he laid great store, played a crucial part in the sequel.
[…]
It is Simplicio who, after being shown up as an ass over and again, trots out at the very end Pope Urban’s argument as coming “from a most eminent and learned person, and before whom one must fall silent”: whereupon the other two declare themselves silenced by “this admirable and angelic doctrine”, and decide “to go and enjoy an hour of refreshment in the gondola that awaits us”. And thus the Dialogue ends with what can only be described as a rude noise at the Pope – with the consequences that one may expect.
And from Galileo, Science, and the Church:
[…]
