1.
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of science of his generation. Gould spent most of his teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996 Gould was appointed as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, Goulds most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by periods of evolutionary stability. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth. Most of Goulds empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and he contributed to evolutionary developmental biology, and received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans and he campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields whose authorities do not overlap.
Gould was known by the public mainly from his 300 popular essays in the magazine Natural History. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a Living Legend, Stephen Jay Gould was born and raised in the community of Bayside, a neighborhood of the northeastern section of Queens in New York City. His father Leonard was a stenographer and a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. His mother Eleanor was an artist whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the citys Garment District, when Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex. I had no idea there were such things—I was awestruck, Gould once recalled and it was in that moment that he decided to become a paleontologist. Raised in a secular Jewish home, Gould did not formally practice religion, when asked directly if he was an agnostic in Skeptic magazine, he responded, If you absolutely forced me to bet on the existence of a conventional anthropomorphic deity, of course Id bet no.
But, Huxley was right when he said that agnosticism is the honorable position because we really cannot know. Id be real surprised if there turned out to be a conventional God, though he had been brought up by a Marxist father, he stated that his fathers politics were very different from his own. In describing his own views, he has said they tend to the left of center. According to Gould the most influential political books he read were C. Wright Mills The Power Elite, while attending Antioch College in the early 1960s, Gould was active in the civil rights movement and often campaigned for social justice
2.
Dinosaur in a Haystack
Dinosaur in a Haystack is the seventh volume of collected essays by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. The essays were culled from his monthly column The View of Life published in Natural History magazine, the book deals with themes familiar to Goulds writing, science biography and strange oddities found in nature. His essay Poes Greatest Hit analyzes the controversial conchology textbook The Conchologists First Book, Poes volume on natural history sold out within two months, and was his only book republished during his lifetime. Essay Dinomania is a review of Michael Crichtons novel and Steven Spielbergs blockbuster film, Goulds book received favorable reviews in Publishers Weekly and The New York Times. Up Against the Wall - by Steve Jones Essay Summaries - by Lawrence N. Goeller Dinosaur in a Haystack Review - by Danny Yee Book review by Kathryn Denning Two Cultures - by Howard A
3.
Time in physics
Time in physics is defined by its measurement, time is what a clock reads. In classical, non-relativistic physics it is a quantity and, like length, mass. Time can be combined mathematically with other physical quantities to other concepts such as motion, kinetic energy. Timekeeping is a complex of technological and scientific issues, and part of the foundation of recordkeeping, our conception of time has evolved, as shown below. In the International System of Units, the unit of time is the second and this definition is based on the operation of a caesium atomic clock. The UTC timestamp in use worldwide is a time standard. The relative accuracy of such a standard is currently on the order of 10−15. The smallest time step considered observable is called the Planck time, both Galileo and Newton and most people up until the 20th century thought that time was the same for everyone everywhere. This is the basis for timelines, where time is a parameter, thus time is part of a coordinate, in this view.
Physicists believe the entire Universe and therefore time itself began about 13.8 billion years ago in the big bang, whether it will ever come to an end is an open question. In order to time, one can record the number of occurrences of some periodic phenomenon. The regular recurrences of the seasons, the motions of the sun and stars were noted and tabulated for millennia, in particular, the astronomical observatories maintained for religious purposes became accurate enough to ascertain the regular motions of the stars, and even some of the planets. At first, timekeeping was done by hand by priests, and for commerce, the tabulation of the equinoxes, the sandglass, and the water clock became more and more accurate, and finally reliable. For ships at sea, boys were used to turn the sandglasses, richard of Wallingford, abbot of St. Albans abbey, famously built a mechanical clock as an astronomical orrery about 1330. At first, only kings could afford them, pendulum clocks were widely used in the 18th and 19th century.
They have largely replaced in general use by quartz and digital clocks. Atomic clocks can theoretically keep accurate time for millions of years and they are appropriate for standards and scientific use. The Galilean transformations assume that time is the same for all reference frames, in this section, the relationships listed below treat time as a parameter which serves as an index to the behavior of the physical system under consideration
4.
Utopia
A utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or nearly perfect qualities for its citizens. The opposite of a utopia is a dystopia and you could say that utopia is a perfect place that has been made so there are no problems. The term has been used to describe intentional communities, the term utopia was coined from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island society in the Atlantic Ocean. The word comes from Greek, οὐ and τόπος and means no-place, however, in standard usage, the words meaning has narrowed and now usually describes a non-existent society that is intended to be viewed as considerably better than contemporary society. Eutopia, derived from Greek εὖ and τόπος, means good place, in English and utopia are homophonous, which may have given rise to the change in meaning. Chronologically, the first recorded utopian proposal is Platos Republic, part conversation, part fictional depiction, and part policy proposal, Republic would categorize citizens into a rigid class structure of golden, silver and iron socioeconomic classes.
The golden citizens are trained in a rigorous 50-year-long educational program to be benign oligarchs, plato stressed this structure many times in both quotes by him and in his published works, such as the Republic. The wisdom of these rulers will supposedly eliminate poverty and deprivation through fairly distributed resources, the educational program for the rulers is the central notion of the proposal. It has few laws, no lawyers and rarely sends its citizens to war, during the 16th century, Thomas Mores book Utopia proposed an ideal society of the same name. Some maintain the position that Mores Utopia functions only on the level of a satire, but the homophonic prefix eu-, meaning good, resonates in the word, with the implication that the perfectly good place is really no place. Ecological utopian society describes new ways in which society should relate to nature and these works perceive a widening gap between the modern Western way of living that destroys nature and a more traditional way of living before industrialization.
Ecological utopias may advocate a society that is more sustainable, according to the Dutch philosopher Marius de Geus, ecological utopias could be inspirational sources for movements involving green politics. Particularly in the early 19th century, several ideas arose. These ideas are often grouped in a utopian socialist movement. A once common characteristic is a distribution of goods, frequently with the total abolition of money. Citizens only do work which they enjoy and which is for the good, leaving them with ample time for the cultivation of the arts. One classic example of such a utopia was Edward Bellamys Looking Backward, Another socialist utopia is William Morriss News from Nowhere, written partially in response to the top-down nature of Bellamys utopia, which Morris criticized. However, as the socialist movement developed, it moved away from utopianism, in a materialist utopian society, the economy is perfect, there is no inflation, and only perfect social and financial equality exists
5.
Calendar
A calendar is a system of organizing days for social, commercial or administrative purposes. This is done by giving names to periods of time, typically days, months, a date is the designation of a single, specific day within such a system. A calendar is a record of such a system. A calendar can mean a list of planned events, such as a calendar or a partly or fully chronological list of documents. Periods in a calendar are usually, though not necessarily, synchronized with the cycle of the sun or the moon. The most common type of calendar was the lunisolar calendar. Latin calendarium meant account book, the Latin term was adopted in Old French as calendier and from there in Middle English as calender by the 13th century. The course of the Sun and the Moon are the most evident forms of timekeeping, the Roman calendar contained very ancient remnants of a pre-Etruscan 10-month solar year. The first recorded calendars date to the Bronze Age, dependent on the development of writing in the Ancient Near East, a larger number of calendar systems of the Ancient Near East becomes accessible in the Iron Age, based on the Babylonian calendar.
This includes the calendar of the Persian Empire, which in turn gave rise to the Zoroastrian calendar as well as the Hebrew calendar, calendars in antiquity were lunisolar, depending on the introduction of intercalary months to align the solar and the lunar years. This was mostly based on observation, but there may have been attempts to model the pattern of intercalation algorithmically. The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, the Julian calendar was no longer dependent on the observation of the new moon but simply followed an algorithm of introducing a leap day every four years. This created a dissociation of the month from the lunation. The Islamic calendar is based on the prohibition of intercalation by Muhammad and this resulted in an observationally based lunar calendar that shifts relative to the seasons of the solar year. The first calendar reform of the modern era was the Gregorian calendar. Such ideas are mooted from time to time but have failed to gain traction because of the loss of continuity, massive upheaval in implementation, a full calendar system has a different calendar date for every day.
Thus the week cycle is by not a full calendar system. The simplest calendar system just counts time periods from a reference date and this applies for the Julian day or Unix Time
6.
180th meridian
The 180th meridian or antimeridian is the meridian 180° east or west of the Prime Meridian, with which it forms a great circle dividing the earth into the Western and Eastern Hemispheres. It is common to both east longitude and west longitude and it is used as the basis for the International Date Line because it for the most part passes through the open waters of the Pacific Ocean. However, the passes through Russia and Fiji as well as Antarctica. The only place where roads cross this meridian, and where there are very close to it, is in Fiji. Many geographic software libraries or data formats project the world to a rectangle and this often makes it non-trivial to do simple tasks over the 180th meridian. Some examples, The GeoJSON specification strongly suggests splitting geometries so that neither of their parts cross the antimeridian, in OpenStreetMap, areas are split at the 180th meridian. 179th meridian east 179th meridian west Prime meridian
7.
Ordinal number
In set theory, an ordinal number, or ordinal, is one generalization of the concept of a natural number that is used to describe a way to arrange a collection of objects in order, one after another. Any finite collection of objects can be put in order just by the process of counting, labeling the objects with distinct whole numbers, Ordinal numbers are thus the labels needed to arrange collections of objects in order. An ordinal number is used to describe the type of a well ordered set. Whereas ordinals are useful for ordering the objects in a collection, they are distinct from cardinal numbers, although the distinction between ordinals and cardinals is not always apparent in finite sets, different infinite ordinals can describe the same cardinal. Like other kinds of numbers, ordinals can be added, multiplied, a natural number can be used for two purposes, to describe the size of a set, or to describe the position of an element in a sequence. When restricted to finite sets these two concepts coincide, there is one way to put a finite set into a linear sequence.
This is because any set has only one size, there are many nonisomorphic well-orderings of any infinite set. Whereas the notion of number is associated with a set with no particular structure on it. A well-ordered set is an ordered set in which there is no infinite decreasing sequence, equivalently. Ordinals may be used to label the elements of any given well-ordered set and this length is called the order type of the set. Any ordinal is defined by the set of ordinals that precede it, in fact, the most common definition of ordinals identifies each ordinal as the set of ordinals that precede it. For example, the ordinal 42 is the type of the ordinals less than it, i. e. the ordinals from 0 to 41. Conversely, any set of ordinals that is downward-closed—meaning that for any ordinal α in S and any ordinal β < α, β is in S—is an ordinal. There are infinite ordinals as well, the smallest infinite ordinal is ω, which is the type of the natural numbers. After all of these come ω·2, ω·2+1, ω·2+2, and so on, ω·3, now the set of ordinals formed in this way must itself have an ordinal associated with it, and that is ω2.
Further on, there will be ω3, ω4, and so on, and ωω, ωωω, later ωωωω and this can be continued indefinitely far. The smallest uncountable ordinal is the set of all countable ordinals, in a well-ordered set, every non-empty subset contains a distinct smallest element. Given the axiom of dependent choice, this is equivalent to just saying that the set is ordered and there is no infinite decreasing sequence
8.
24-hour clock
The 24-hour clock is the convention of time keeping in which the day runs from midnight to midnight and is divided into 24 hours, indicated by the hours passed since midnight, from 0 to 23. This system is the most commonly used time notation in the world today, in the practice of medicine, the 24-hour clock is generally used in documentation of care as it prevents any ambiguity as to when events occurred in a patients medical history. It is popularly referred to as time in the United States. In the case of a second, the value of ss may extend to 60. A leading zero is added for numbers under 10 and this zero is optional for the hours, but very commonly used in computer applications, where many specifications require it. Where subsecond resolution is required, the seconds can be a fraction, that is. The most commonly used separator symbol between hours and seconds is the colon, which is the used in ISO8601. In the past, some European countries used the dot on the line as a separator, in some contexts, no separator is used and times are written as, for example,2359.
In East Asia, time notation was 24-hour before westernization in modern times, the clocks were changed into 12 dual-hours style when they were shipped to China in the Qing dynasty. In the 24-hour time notation, the day begins at midnight,00,00, and the last minute of the day begins at 23,59. Where convenient, the notation 24,00 may be used to refer to midnight at the end of a given date – that is,24,00 of one day is the time as 00,00 of the following day. The notation 24,00 mainly serves to refer to the end of a day in a time interval. A typical usage is giving opening hours ending at midnight, some railway timetables show 00,00 as departure time and 24,00 as arrival time. Legal contracts often run from the date at 00,00 until the end date at 24,00. While the 24-hour notation unambiguously distinguishes between midnight at the start and end of any date, there is no commonly accepted distinction among users of the 12-hour notation. Sometimes the use of 00,00 is avoided, in variance with this, the correspondence manual for the U. S.
Navy and U. S. Marine Corps formerly specified 0001 to 2400. The manual was updated in June 2015 to use 0000 to 2359, time-of-day notations beyond 24,00 are not commonly used and not covered by the relevant standards. In most countries, computers by default show the time in 24-hour notation, for example, Microsoft Windows and macOS activate the 12-hour notation by default only if a computer is in a handful of specific language and region settings
9.
Odometer
An odometer or odograph is an instrument that indicates distance travelled by a vehicle, such as a bicycle or automobile. The device may be electronic, mechanical, or a combination of the two, the noun derives from the Greek words hodós and métron. Possibly the first evidence for the use of an odometer can be found in the works of the ancient Roman Pliny, both authors list the distances of routes traveled by Alexander the Great as by his bematists Diognetus and Baeton. However, the accuracy of the bematistss measurements rather indicates the use of a mechanical device. 2% from the actual distance. From the nine surviving bematists measurements in Plinys Naturalis Historia eight show a deviation of less than 5% from the actual distance, three of them being within 1%. An odometer for measuring distance was first described by Vitruvius around 27 and 23 BC, hero of Alexandria describes a similar device in chapter 34 of his Dioptra. Some researchers have speculated that the device might have included technology similar to that of the Greek Antikythera mechanism, the odometer of Vitruvius was based on chariot wheels of 4 feet diameter turning 400 times in one Roman mile.
For each revolution a pin on the axle engaged a 400 tooth cogwheel thus turning it one complete revolution per mile and this engaged another gear with holes along the circumference, where pebbles were located, that were to drop one by one into a box. The distance traveled would thus be given simply by counting the number of pebbles, whether this instrument was ever built at the time is disputed. Leonardo da Vinci tried to build it himself according to the description, however, in 1981 engineer Andre Sleeswyk built his own replica, replacing the square-toothed gear designs of da Vinci with the triangular, pointed teeth found in the Antikythera mechanism. With this modification, the Vitruvius odometer functioned perfectly, the odometer was independently invented in ancient China, possibly by the prolific inventor and early scientist Zhang Heng of the Han Dynasty. By the 3rd century, the Chinese had termed the device as the jì lĭ gŭ chē, there is speculation that some time in the 1st century BC, the beating of drums and gongs were mechanically-driven by working automatically off the rotation of the road-wheels.
This might have actually been the design of one Loxia Hong, the odometer was used in subsequent periods of Chinese history. In the historical text of the Jin Shu, the oldest part of the compiled text, the passage in the Jin Shu expanded upon this, explaining that it took a similar form to the mechanical device of the south-pointing chariot invented by Ma Jun. As recorded in the Song Shi of the Song Dynasty, the odometer and south-pointing chariot were combined into one wheeled device by engineers of the 9th century, 11th century, and 12th century. The Sun Tzu Suan Ching, dated from the 3rd century to 5th century, the historical text of the Song Shi, recording the people and events of the Chinese Song Dynasty, mentioned the odometer used in that period. At the completion of every li, the figure of a man in the lower storey strikes a drum, at the completion of every ten li. The carriage-pole ends in a phoenix-head, and the carriage is drawn by four horses, the escort was formerly of 18 men, but in the 4th year of the Yung-Hsi reign-period the emperor Thai Tsung increased it to 30
10.
Time
Time is the indefinite continued progress of existence and events that occur in apparently irreversible succession from the past through the present to the future. Time is often referred to as the dimension, along with the three spatial dimensions. Time has long been an important subject of study in religion and science, diverse fields such as business, sports, the sciences, and the performing arts all incorporate some notion of time into their respective measuring systems. Two contrasting viewpoints on time divide prominent philosophers, one view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe—a dimension independent of events, in which events occur in sequence. Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is referred to as Newtonian time. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, Time in physics is unambiguously operationally defined as what a clock reads. Time is one of the seven fundamental physical quantities in both the International System of Units and International System of Quantities, Time is used to define other quantities—such as velocity—so defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition.
The operational definition leaves aside the question there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows. Investigations of a single continuum called spacetime bring questions about space into questions about time, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy. Furthermore, it may be there is a subjective component to time. Temporal measurement has occupied scientists and technologists, and was a motivation in navigation. Periodic events and periodic motion have long served as standards for units of time, examples include the apparent motion of the sun across the sky, the phases of the moon, the swing of a pendulum, and the beat of a heart. Currently, the unit of time, the second, is defined by measuring the electronic transition frequency of caesium atoms. Time is of significant social importance, having economic value as well as value, due to an awareness of the limited time in each day. In day-to-day life, the clock is consulted for periods less than a day whereas the calendar is consulted for periods longer than a day, personal electronic devices display both calendars and clocks simultaneously.
The number that marks the occurrence of an event as to hour or date is obtained by counting from a fiducial epoch—a central reference point. Artifacts from the Paleolithic suggest that the moon was used to time as early as 6,000 years ago. Lunar calendars were among the first to appear, either 12 or 13 lunar months, without intercalation to add days or months to some years, seasons quickly drift in a calendar based solely on twelve lunar months
