Re: Google Search, The Case for a Scientific Education, and Google Cars

Posted by Shawn Barr on
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Case-for-a-Scientific-Education-tp5635994p5710739.html

Lee,

A similar quote appears in a "The Theater Critic and His Double" by John Simon in the _Hudson Review_:

"Thus he sees, apparently, two Edmund Wilsons where there is only one admittedly large one, two cultures where one wonders whether there is even one, and a whole wit in George Steiner."

which could be

"Thus he sees . . . two cultures where one wonders whether there is even one . . . ."

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3848465

Other than that I didn't find anything on Google.  

Yet, I'm curious why the "can discern" version is worth 10+ years of searching.


Best,
Shawn

On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:26 PM, <[hidden email]> wrote:

"At the time I said I was reminded of what the critic
John Simon had said about CP Snow: 'He sees two cultures
where I see barely one.'" (Raymond Sokolov, _Why We Eat
What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World
Eats_, thanks to Google Books)

I remember the quotation attributed to Simon somewhat
differently (where Sokolov quotes "see", I remember
"can discern"), and now that I have a pointer to Simon
I'll continue looking for the horse's-mouth version;
but at last Google now has it (I've searched for it on
Google every few months, as long as there's been a
Google to search for it on, and otherwise longer than
that, including on many newsgroups and mailing lists).

Meanwhile, what do all you-all think about the Google
Car (the autonomous urban transporter, not the Google
Street View snooper),
<http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?>?
It's very interesting (to me) that, at least in the Times
article, although Sebastian Thrun naturally is featured
largely, somehow the phrase "Willow Garage" never appears.
Maybe Google *is* evil, hmm?

Lee Rudolph

> Let's leave it to C.P. Snow <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures>:
>
> A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the
> standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who
> have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the
> illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked
> the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of
> Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was
> asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: *Have you read a
> work of Shakespeare's?*
>
> I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question - such as, What
> do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of
> saying, *Can you read?* - not more than one in ten of the highly educated
> would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice
> of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in
> the western world have about as much insight into it as
> their neolithic ancestors would have had.
>



============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org