Posts Tagged ‘Senefelder’
“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of the imagination”*…
Itai Yanai and Martin Lercher on the importance of interdisciplinarity and creativity in science…
The hypothesis-testing mode of science, which François Jacob called “day science,” operates within the confines of a particular scientific field. As highly specialized experts, we confidently and safely follow the protocols of our paradigms and research programs . But there is another side of science, which Jacob called “night science”: the much less structured process by which new ideas arise and questions and hypotheses are generated. While day science is compartmentalized, night science is truly interdisciplinary. You may bring an answer from your home field to another discipline, or conversely, venturing into another field may let you discover a route towards answering a research question in your
main discipline. To be most creative, we may be best off cultivating interests in many areas, much like Renaissance thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo Galilei. But this creativity-enhancing interdisciplinarity comes at a price we may call “expert’s dilemma”: with your loss of status as a highly focused expert comes a loss of credibility, making it harder to get your work accepted by your peers. To resolve the dilemma, we must find our own balance between disciplinary day science expertise and interdisciplinary night science creativity…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Renaissance minds in 21st century science,” from @ItaiYanai and @MartinJLercher.
See also: “Night Science“
And for more: see their project’s home page and listen to their podcast.
Apposite: “8 lessons on lifelong learning from an astrophysicist,” from Ethan Siegel.
* John Dewey
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As we find a balance, we might send easily-reproducible birthday greetings to a man who was moved by necessity to cross disciplinary boundaries, Alois Senefelder; he was born on this date in 1771. A playwright and actor, was having trouble getting his plays printed; he needed a less expensive and more efficient printing alternative to relief printed hand set type or etched plates. So he invented the technique we call lithography– the biggest revolution in the printing industry since Gutenberg’s movable type.
The principle is simple: oil-based printing ink and water repel each other. The image is drawn on a stone (Bavarian limestone for Senefelder) with greasy crayon, after which the stone is soaked in water, which is absorbed into the part of the stone not covered in greasy paint. The ink is rolled onto the stone. The image areas of the stone accept ink and undrawn areas reject it. Finally, a piece of paper is pressed onto the stone, and the ink transfers onto the paper from the stone.
Senefelder called the technique “stone printing” or “chemical printing,” but the French name “lithography” became more widely adopted. Today photo lithography is used to print magazines and books, but the original process of drawing by hand on litho stones still exists in the fine art world.
“I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time…”*
click here for larger version of full infographic
From our old friend David McCandless and his ever-illuminating Information is Beautiful, a look at length… The image above is the beginning of a fascinating infographic in which he compares the relative length (code base size) of applications, devices, and (considering DNA to be “code”) organisms. There are some surprises (Mac OSX 10.4 is bigger than the U.S. Army’s Future Combat System; the software in a modern high-end car is bigger than both); and– as one sees when one scrolls all the way to the bottom, a poignant relevancy: the Healthcare.gov website (according to most-recently released figures) is much, much bigger still– over 8 times the size of Facebook’s code base, almost 4 times as large as the genome of a mouse.
*Blaise Pascal (often attributed to Mark Twain, who did also say it)
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As we contemplate complexity, we might send efficiently-printed birthday greetings to Johann Alois Senefelder; he was born on this date in 1771. A playwright and actor who’d fallen into debt over printing problems with one of his plays, Senefelder began to experiment with cheaper ways of bringing his works to market– a less expensive and more efficient printing alternative to relief printed hand set type or etched plates. His invention, lithography, was the biggest revolution in the printing industry since Johannes Gutenberg’s movable type.
The principle is simple: an image is drawn with greasy crayon (traditionally, on Bavarian limestone) and chemically treated/fixed; the image areas of the stone accept oil-based ink and undrawn areas reject it. Today, photo lithography is the primary technique used to print magazines and books; but Senefelder’s original process of drawing by hand on litho stones is still in use in the fine arts.
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