So here it is, Science Musings on the web, a regular meditation on humankind’s quest to understand the universe, including, of course, ourselves.
Articles with Internet
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Protecting rights in the noosphere
My tattered copy of Teilhard de Chardin’s “The Phenomenon of Man,” which I read enthusiastically when it was published as an English paperback in 1961, now and then tumbles off the bookshelf, demanding a re-read.
The first-generation Apple AirPort wireless basestation • Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY
Into the woods, wired to wireless
I’m wired. Or I should say, I’m wired wireless.
A partial diagrammatic map of node connections on the internet • Image by Matt Britt (CC BY 2.5)
Built without a plan
The World Wide Web is the first technological artifact that was not built from a blueprint.
Photo by Pavel Herceg on Unsplash
Can a body meet a body coming through the wire?
There is a now-famous New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner that has come to define the age of electronic communication. It shows two dogs sitting in front of a computer. One pooch says to the other: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
Photo by Blake Cheek on Unsplash
Learning to navigate in a sea of information
All summer we followed the Mars Pathfinder mission on the Internet. We saw the pictures and examined the data beamed backed from Mars, almost as quickly as they were available to the scientists at mission control.
Portrait of Samuel Johnson (1775) by Joshua Reynolds, which has become an internet meme centuries later
May the best meme win
We’ve all received those chain letters that describe wonderful things that have happened to people who kept the chain going.
Photo by Thanhy Nguyen on Unsplash
No thanks, Ma’am, to ‘spam’ ban
Remember the Fuller brush man? The Avon lady? There was a time when a knock on the door might be the unwelcome intrusion of a salesperson into the privacy of our homes.
Photo by Squared.one on Unsplash
A refrigerator door for the world
The French scientist/theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who died in 1955, believed that life on Earth is driven upwards towards complexity and consciousness by a psychic force present in all of matter.
Photo by camilo jimenez on Unsplash
Beware: Electronic logorrhea looms
My editor asked if I wanted my e‑mail address appended to this column. Good heavens, no.