Posts tagged as:

philosophy of science

Mission of Gravity, Part 3:
GOCE updates the shape of the Earth

June 28, 2010

The GOCE satellite flies extraordinarily low and it thrusts constantly to compensate for air drag while making exquisite measurements of the gravitational gradient. The just-released result is a map of the geoid — the gravitational equipotential surface of the Earth — shown below as a delta from an idealized ellipsoid. GOCE can measure the geoid [...]

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Inquiry in Engineering, Design in Science:
Completing the Matrix

June 7, 2010

The focus of science is inquiry, and the focus of engineering is design. Just as sensory and motor neurons run antiparallel through the structure of the body, so inquiry and design run antiparallel through the structure of knowledge. Eye and hand, perception and action, measuring and making, science seeking knowledge, engineering seeking function.
I’ve been exploring [...]

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Knowledge and causality in inquiry and design

June 3, 2010

The structure of science and engineering, a big mistake, and a book

See also: “The Antiparallel Structures of Science and Engineering”

An effect may have one possible cause, or many. The weight of a stone has a single cause, gravity, but the flight of a stone coming over a wall could have one of many [...]

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Is 华大基因 doing science?
     (aka BGI)

March 18, 2010

In a decade, the global Human Genome Project sequenced 3 billion DNA base pairs. Today, a single machine (the Illumina HiSeq™ 2000) can sequence 25 billion base pairs per day, and BGI (the Shenzhen company formerly known as the Beijing Genomics Institute) has purchased 128 of them. This puts BGI “on track to surpass [...]

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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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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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