From the category archives:

Bloggy-blogging

For Darwin’s sake, reject “Darwin-ism”
 (and other pernicious terms)

December 31, 2009

On this last day of the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth, I’d like to suggest that we honor Darwin by rejecting the dubious term “Darwinism”.
To call something an “ism” suggests that it is a matter ideology or faith, like Trotskyism or creationism. In the evolution wars, the term “evolutionism” is used to insinuate that the modern [...]

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“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”
(Richard Feynman, Pasadena, 29 December 1959)

December 29, 2009

“Feynman’s 1959 talk, entitled ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’”, was delivered 50 years ago today, and the words I’ve quoted above are the first words in the first sentence of the first paper I wrote, almost 30 years ago, on what later became known as “nanotechnology”. Feynman read and discussed the paper with [...]

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Khan Academy:
On a mission to educate the world (for free)

December 28, 2009

I got a pointer to a free, online educational resource today.
It deserves more attention.
The eyeballs of a few million students might be a good start. Students in elementary school, grad school, rural Africa… places like that.
It consists of 1000+ brief lectures on YouTube.
It centers on math, but goes beyond.
Here are a few samples that [...]

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More about less opportunity for young scientists

December 22, 2009

I recently wrote about the trend away from funding young scientists as independent investigators, with a graph of age distributions at NIH and related observations here. There’s been a lively discussion at the Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog. I posted a link there to an NIH dataset [XLS spreadsheet], and a commenter [...]

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The promise that launched

 the field of nanotechnology

December 15, 2009

Part 1 of a series on the history and prospects of advanced nanotechnology concepts, prompted by the upcoming 50th anniversary of Feynman’s historic talk, “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”.

When the first million readers encountered “nanotechnology”
Now, over 20 years after the fact, it is easy to forget that a concept called “nanotechnology” first swept [...]

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Most popular posts, continued…

November 18, 2009

A few weeks ago, I highlighted some of the most popular posts in Metamodern’s first year (see “Knowledge about Knowledge…”). Posts that offer videos, documents, or talk slides also ranked high:
With downloadable documents and talk slides:

Molecular Nanomachines: Physical Principles and Implementation Strategies
My MIT dissertation — a draft of Nanosystems — is now online [...]

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Indian education, top to bottom

November 5, 2009

In response to my last post, which mentioned some high points in Indian education, a comment by fiaorsh offers some perspective on the extensive low points.
Since my reply ended up looking more like a post, I’m making it one:

@ fiaorsh — You make some important points regarding education in India, and I’d like to [...]

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E-Drexler in India —
where do all the visitors come from?

November 2, 2009

Rosa recently returned from Ashoka meetings in Chennai and Hyderabad, reminding me of some information I’d collected about Indian visits to my website, E-drexler.com. India is enormously diverse (e.g., many cultures, 18 officially recognized regional languages, and very different state governments), and I became curious about where inside India this traffic was coming from. Here’s [...]

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Knowledge about Knowledge:
The most popular posts in the first year

October 29, 2009

Metamodern’s readership shows what I consider to be good taste. Five of the six most popular posts in the blog’s first year (and several more in the top 20) have been, not about news or about the specifics of a technology, but instead about something deeper and more durable: knowledge itself — the structure of [...]

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First Anniversary
(and the scientific method revisited)

October 25, 2009

Metamodern is one year old today, and I wish I’d started a blog years earlier. I have some notes on popular posts in the last year — there are some interesting patterns that I’ve been pleased to see — but here, today, it seems fitting to revisit the first.
My 25 October 2008 post, “The Data [...]

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An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

October 24, 2009

This week, with the help of Viking Press, Stewart Brand has offered the world an important book on the collision between humanity and the Earth’s limits — on the facts, the problems, the passions, the politics, and the realistic possibilities for better outcomes.
After Whole Earth Discipline appeared in my mail, I opened it and skimmed [...]

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Reflections on nanotechnology
(in a curved mirror)

October 23, 2009

Earlier today, Nanowerk.com posted an article I wrote. It begins like this:
Yesterday, an article in Nanowerk presented yet another description — by someone else — of what I think about nanotechnology. Since I am a leading expert on that topic, perhaps I can offer a more direct and reliable statement of my actual views, together [...]

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