Greg Priest

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table; Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets, The muttering retreats Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells: Streets that follow like a tedious argument Of insidious intent To lead you to an overwhelming question ... Oh, do not ask, “What is it?” Let us go and make our visit.

On the far-away island of Sala-ma-Sond, Yertle the Turtle was king of the pond. A nice little pond. It was clean. It was neat. The water was warm. There was plenty to eat. The turtles had everything turtles might need. And they were all happy. Quite happy indeed. They were... untill Yertle, the king of them all, Decided the kingdom he ruled was too small. "I'm ruler", said Yertle, "of all that I see. But I don't see enough. That's the trouble with me.

It’s National Poetry Day (UK). What are your favorite poetic openings?

#Poetry #BookSkyn

Marshall with his family at his swearing in. Photographer unknown.

OTD in 1967, Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.

#polisky

Watercolor of HMS Beagle at anchor by Owen Stanley.

OTD in 1836, HMS Beagle docked at Falmouth, after a 5 year voyage.

Charles Darwin wrote in his diary, “To my surprise and shame, I confess the first sight of the shores of England inspired me with no warmer feelings, than if it had been a miserable Portuguese settlement.”

🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #STS

Cartoon of Darwin holding a copy of the Original, looking into a mirror and seeing as his reflection Malthus holding a copy off his Essay on the Principle of Population. By Tom Dunne for American Scientist.

OTD in 1838, Charles Darwin read Malthus’s Principles of Population “for amusement.”

The idea of a “war of nature” was venerable, but D realized that such a war would tend to remove deleterious variations from populations. Natural selection would necessarily follow.

🌱🐋🧪#HistSTM #philsci 📈📉#evolbio

L: Color print magazine advertisement for Pennsalt DDT products. This ad appeared in Time Magazine, June 30, 1947. Science History Institute.

R: Photo of children being spayed with DDT in a public swimming pool. Date and photographer unknown.

🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published OTD in 1962.

“[W]e have now acquired a fateful power to alter and destroy nature. But man is a part of nature, and his war against nature is inevitably a war against himself.”

🌱🐋 # HistSTM 🧪🌎 #philsci #philsky #WomeninSTEM

Photograph of Morgan's Fly Room at Columbia University, around 1920. American Philosophical Society.

Thomas Hunt Morgan was born OTD in 1866.

If you're ever feeling that your work is uending and unedifying, remember that he once said this: "Two years work wasted, I have been breeding those flies for all that time and I've got nothing out of it."

🌱🐋🧪 #HistSTM

Lovely. I know of Allen, of course. I didn’t know that he called Gould Jay. Was that a commonly used nickname for him, do you know?

“We must therefore try to establish a new standpoint which … takes account of organic wholeness, but … treats it in a manner which admits of scientific investigation.”

🐋🌱🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci #evolbio #STS 🧪

Cover of General System Theory.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy—the architect of “General System Theory”—was born OTD in 1901.

Mechanism “provides us with no grasp of … organic 'wholeness,’ … of organic 'teleology,’ or of the historical character of organisms.…”

🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #PhilSci #evolbio #STS 🧪

Caricature by David Levine for the New York Review of Books.

Samuel Johnson was born OTD in 1709.

Selecting one quote from my notes was a challenge, but here goes: “Almost every man wastes part of his life attempting to display qualities which he does not possess.”

#PhilSky

Great book!

H’s chart of plant distribution, featuring an image of Mount Chimborazo

Alexander von Humboldt was born OTD in 1769.

“[My] principal impulse … was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces.”

🦋🦫🐋🌱🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci

Fair enough. It is probably fair to say that B doesn’t have a fully-developed metaphysics of anything (history included). His whole approach is more playful than systematic. But I stand by the claim (which maybe you aren’t challenging?) that historicity has a solidity for him. It matters.

Stephen Jay Gould was born OTD in 1941.

“Organisms are not billiard balls, propelled by simple and measurable external forces to predictable new positions on life's pool table.... Organisms have a history that constrains their future in myriad, subtle ways.”

🦫🦋🐋🌱🧠🗃️🧪#HistSTM #PhilSci #EvoBio

Charles Sanders Peirce was born OTD in 1839. I’ve always loved this quote:

“We cannot begin with complete doubt.”

It pithily captures the pragmaticist (as he would have it) rejection of the search for foundations—we are *always* in medias res.

🦫🦋 #PhilSky #PhilSci

Jon Hodge has died. A great scholar, and a lovely man.

May his memory be a blessing.

🧪🐋🌱 #philsci #histstm

Manuscript title page of On the Origin of Species, in Charles Darwin’s hand.

OTD in 1854, Charles Darwin began sorting his notes in preparation for writing a treatise with the working title “Natural Selection.”

He would never publish the book, instead publishing a short “abstract”—titled “On the Origin of Species”—in 1859.

🐋🌱 #HistSTM #evolbio 🧪

Got you on the van. My bad. Thanks. Slip of the thumb/head.

I don’t speak Dutch. Is that first name most commonly rendered Antonj or Antoni?

My understanding is that he was baptized Thonis, but that he usually went by Antonj. I believe that the most commonly used Anglicization of his name is Antonie, followed by Antoni.

The goal "is to identify each animal's perceptual cues among all the stimuli in its environment and to build up the animal's specific world with them.”

🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #evolbio #philsci #psychsky 🧪

von Uexküll's diagram of the functional cycle that creates an animal's inner perceptual world, from his Theoretical Biology (1926), 155.

Jakob von Uexküll was born OTD in 1864.

Each animal inhabits its own individual "umwelt," comprising only those aspects of the world that are relevant to its survival and flourishing.

🌱🐋🦫🦋 #HistSTM #evolbio #philsci #psychsky 🧪

Here are some of Leeuwenhoek’s sketches of the animalcules, from a different letter.

OTD in 1674, Antonie von Leeuwenhoek sent the first of many letters to Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society of London describing the “animalcules” he’d observed in rainwater using a microscope.

🐡🐋🌱 #HistSTM 🧪

Caricature of Gödel by David Levine for The New York Teview of Books.

Kurt Gödel presented his first incompleteness theorem at a conference in Königsberg OTD in 1930.

Ironically, one of G’s principal goals was positive—to defend the Platonist view that some mathematical truths are perceivable by intuition, even if unprovable.

🧪🦫🦋 #PhilSci #HistSTM

Oops. Thanks for the correction!

Caricature of Midgley by Nicola Jennings for The Guardian.

Mary Midgley was born OTD in 1919.

“Philosophy, like speaking prose, is something we have to do all our lives, well or badly, whether we notice it or not.”

“Animals are not machines…. Actually only machines are machines.”

🌱🐋🦫🦋🧪 #philsky #philsci

I can certainly confirm that this has proven true for my posts.

Call this “qualitative data” or “mere anecdote,” according to your preference.

Research posts on Bluesky are more original — and get better engagement Bluesky posts about science garner more likes and reposts than similar ones on X.

New study on #BlueSky for #SciComm.

“Bluesky posts demonstrate substantially higher levels of interaction (likes, reposts, replies, and quotes) and greater textual originality than previously reported for X, suggesting both stronger interactive and more interpretive engagement.”

🦋🦫🌱🐋🧪 #philsci

I don’t argue that this quote proves the falsity of the theory of the block, or even that it makes an argument against the block. It is a statement of a metaphysical commitment. Vivid. Even beautiful IMO. But the quote from Williams is no more than a statement of the opposing metaphysical commitment