038 The Human Condition

Hello!
Here's the weekly "Amazing Things & Ideas Newsletter" which aims at making the reader a more rational thinker. As always, find one original idea from my side followed by the List.
     And if you like reading this edition, let the world hear it!
 

The Human Condition

 
The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• The 150th blog post on my blog:
  “Under a different light & magnitude”
  
  My own blog post made it to the Amazing Things & Ideas List this week!
  
  This is my 150th (!) blog post I've written on the blog and it is on a very intriguing phenomena:
  
  The same things (oddly) change when looked at under a "new light" or viewed under different magnitudes of size and "zoom" (broadening our vision or niching it down). 
  
  Then lastly I reflect on the 150 posts published on the blog.
  
  Read it here.
   
• Mysterious rocks that "move on their own":
  99 Years Later... We Solved It — Physics Girl
  
  There's these rocks that move on their own. We just say they move on their own because that's what we see until we figure out a cause for what's doing that to them (a mystical force, in a sense — that was until we did not know what made it move). 
  
  But now we know what makes them move. This video is about that fascinating phenomena.
  
  Watch the video here.
   
• Karl Popper on founding a school:
  
  “If I thought of a future, I dreamt of one day founding a school in which young people could learn without boredom, and would be stimulated to pose problems and discuss them; a school in which no unwanted answers to unasked questions would have to be listened to; in which one did not study for the sake of passing examinations.”
   
• Steven Pinker's book on rationality:
  Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
  
  This book is a joy to read for me because the contents in it are all something I really enjoy thinking about. Nevertheless, it does contain fascinating new insights (for me) around the broad subject of rationality.
  
  This book grew out of a course professor Pinker taught at Harvard "exploring the nature of rationality and the puzzle of why it seems to be so scarce." I'd recommend giving it a read, it's a great book so far I've read!

Thank you for reading.

Onward, 
Arjun

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