Sunday, December 9, 2007

"Sense"

Welcome to Science Sense!


This blog is about 
  • making sense of the world
  • pointing out nonsense
  • using an internal sense we all have 
  • having sense to know when to shut off being analytical
  • enjoying and appreciating life and the other five senses

The internal sense is not something supernatural like ESP, but an ability to examine the world within our minds, using imagination and logic.  It is an eye on an inner world of ideas.  It is the sense that Einstein  used to see the world with his "thought experiments".    In the next post you'll see that "thought experiments" started way before Einstein.
 
[A note on punctuation.  I know that in American English, the convention is to put the period inside the quotes.  I've always found that illogical because quotes are like parentheses, and a period is an outer delimiter of the sentence.  The quote is inside the sentence, not the other way around.  Why would you put part of the sentence after the thing that marked its end?  So in this blog I will not put the period inside quotes.]
 
I'll have more to say about each aspect of the word "sense".    Here are some of the things I hope to cover in the blog:

Science: 
  • science news, especially of physics 
  • science politics and ethics
  • my ideas
  • explanations, like what "relativity" means 
  • how to develop that internal sense, an inner logical eye 
  • pseudoscience (i.e., nonsense)
Politics:
  • opinions about the news of the US and the world
  • opinions about important causes and ways to help
  • opinions about electoral politics

Philosophy & Religion:
  • what does it all mean?
  • how does a scientist make sense of the world and find happiness?
  • issues of religion and science
  • issues of religion and politics (yikes!)
  • issues of morality and ethics (outside of science)

Reviews:
  • music
  • books
  • movies

I will try to indicate my qualifications for the subject at hand  (trained, informed, none), and the confidence level of the ideas (established, likely, speculative).  This way, you'll know what to take with a grain of salt.

I hardly know where to start!   But I do know when it is time to end.  See you next post.


3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Re periods and quotation marks: it's the English language. Why are you looking for logic?

eyesopen said...

I am even sillier than that. I secretly hope others will follow, and we will make the punctuation rules more logical.

-EO

FTK said...

Congrats eyesopen. You have your first convert.