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NEW IDEAS. To walk in the shoes of another is to see the world from another perspective. To glimpse, even for a minute, however superficially, the mind of a mathematician, a quantum physicist, an astrophysicist, a botanist, a geologist, or a paleontologist, is to enrich our experience in ways that cannot be counted. View in LinkedIn

SILO-LAND. The greatest challenge to accessing this treasure trove of original thought is that specialization has created deep dark silos with their own impenetrable languages and inaccessibility. The age of the polymath is long past. This means that cross-fertilization between fields is much harder today. The wonderful hybrid vigor of cross-pollination has led to hothouse fragility and inbreeding. View in LinkedIn

NUMBED. The majority of workaday lives are occupied with numbingly dull tasks that leave the body weary and repeat endlessly in this fight against the Theatre of the Absurd. The Mind is reduced to a litany of shopping lists, muted by media obsessed with the lowest common denominator, and what remains of curiosity and wonder is squashed into oblivion. View in LinkedIn

THE EMPTY CHASM. Hamm in Beckett’s Endgame: “Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all the ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe...” https://lnkd.in/enymE7ji View in LinkedIn

DUCKING THE PRICE OF BREAD. Such extraordinary virtual friends and dinner guests offer to give lively conversation, expand your mind, and avoid the numbing reality of Samuel Beckett overwhelming your dinner table conversations with the price of bread. View in LinkedIn

A GREAT START. “In all, this initial analysis is limited by being qualitative and without consideration of curvature, but it reveals enough internal consistency for further analysis to be of interest.” https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/JHEP07(2019)140.pdf View in LinkedIn

The natural magnifying glass of rain drops on the waterproof cuticle of a leaf. View in LinkedIn

CHEMICAL ASYMMETRY. “The emergence of chirality effect at extended scales of self-assembled systems from achiral or racemic precursors has long been a matter of curiosity for scientists, because the underlying mechanisms are fundamentally significance to understand the origin of homochirality in life.” https://lnkd.in/ezpx7SET View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this weekend’s explanation for why I do these kooky posts. Strange in a way that is interesting would be the biggest compliment that you could give them. Accessing extraordinary thinking from extraordinary Minds hidden in obscure places. Widening the parochial village circle to make friends with some of the most original Minds in history and feeding insatiable curiosity to live in an enhanced altered state of awe. https://lnkd.in/eY8TaA3x View in LinkedIn

MIND THE GAP. A state of awe is the beginning of the path to the secular sublime, the realization that we know little, and it is the gaps that illuminate the nature of reality. It is what is missing that is the most important part of this portrait. View in LinkedIn