scientificphilosopher

[scientificphilosopher]

I LOVE space and I LOVE space exploration. What I do not love is gilded plutocrats rocketing off into space just for kicks and clout. It’s a grotesque display of inequality. A space race between billionaires is morally unjustifiable in the face of a suffering planet.

#jeff bezos #blue origin #anti capitalism #fuck billionaires #elon musk #science #nich

[scientificphilosopher]

“Here are stars in uncountable numbers, each (perhaps) warming Earths unseen, other Earths teeming with other life. Here are galaxies where stars by the hundreds of billions are bom in gassy nebulas and die in violence. Here are galaxies arrayed in knots and streamers across light-years, across billions of light-years, like motes of dust dancing in window light, worlds and worlds without end, reaching at last back to that singular moment when all that now exists came to be in a blinding flash of pure creation.”

—

Chet Raymo, The Soul of the Night

[scientificphilosopher]

“The human heart is an ancient beast that roars and purrs with the same passions, whatever labels we may give them. We are so anxious to classify and categorize, both nature and human nature. It is a beautiful impulse—to contain the infinite in the finite, to wrest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb toward higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves. The labels we give to the loves of which we are capable—varied and vigorously transfigured from one kind into another and back again—can’t begin to contain the complexity of feeling that can flow between two hearts and the bodies that contain them.”

–Maria Popova, Figuring

[scientificphilosopher]

[scientificphilosopher]

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Follow Ultrafacts for more facts!

[scientificphilosopher]

Night poured over the desert. It came suddenly, in purple. In the clear air, the stars drilled down out of the sky, reminding any thoughtful watcher that it is in the deserts and high places that religions are generated when men see nothing but bottomless infinity over their heads they have always had a driving and desperate urge to find someone to put in the way.

Terry Pratchett (1948-2015) English author

(via

macrolit

)

[scientificphilosopher]

Scientific American article points out there is no real reason to exclude transgender athletes

The Scientific American is one of the world’s leading science journals, so when they print an article about transgender athletes, it is a safe bet that it is science based.

Jack Turban is a fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at the Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches the mental health of transgender youth. 

He addresses the arguments behind the American anti-trans bills:

There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth…

The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. 

Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. 

As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.

Read the whole article here!

Photo by roibu

[scientificphilosopher]

[scientificphilosopher]

I meant to make this meme ages ago when pride month was still on but yeah gé (pronounced gay) is the Irish for a goose.

[scientificphilosopher]

I see you everywhere, in the stars, deep in the river, to me you’re everything that exists; the reality of everything.

Virginia Woolf (via quotemadness)

[scientificphilosopher]

Was Wittgenstein that guy who inspired the creation of Norman Bates and Leatherface? Or was that a different serial killer?

‘Some Luminous and Illuminating Luminaries of the Dead Philosophical Canon’

via: Dead Philosophers in Heaven

[scientificphilosopher]

“In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” –Anatole France

[scientificphilosopher]

“Hands off: neither the whole truth nor the whole good is revealed to any single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the vast field.”

–William James, On a Certain Blindness

#philosophy #quote #reading #books #epistemology #pragmatism #william james

[scientificphilosopher]

Had to share the tags from @mccoalminer

i took a pic of me watching the pickle rick episode to piss people off but like somehow i managed to take the pic so that the frame on the tv was…. a different frame to the reflection on the desk?

[scientificphilosopher]

Memento Mori

Gregory Halili (b. 1975) carves and paints mother-of-pearl shells, creating memento moris. The artist has embarked on a series of skulls, which utilize the entire mother-of-pearl shell, the form mirrors and contains the skull. Halili carves into the shell to bring forth the skulls’ features: bones, teeth, eye sockets, the contour of the head. These are captivating and beguiling objects, they seem to depict the life enhancing part of dying, suggesting the cycle of life goes on and on. The artist writes about his skull series: “I have carefully chosen and selected the large, raw shells that form an almost natural shape of a skull. I find this incredibly amazing and beautiful.” 

Follow the artist here: Gregory Halili

[scientificphilosopher]

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[scientificphilosopher]

99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.

— Carl Sagan