Condensed concepts

 I am on the lookout for good video resources about science that I can recommend to others, particularly non-scientists. By chance, I recently came across the BBC production, The Story of Science: Power, Proof, and Passion , hosted by Michael Mosley. There is also a beautiful book that goes with the series, containing more detail, including colour illustrations. I was able to get the DVDs and the book from my local public library. I particularly appreciate that science is presented as a human endeavour and progress is influenced by local contexts (economic, political, religious, ...). That can be acknowledged and enjoyed without descending into a social constructivist view of scientific knowledge. In a similar vein, the series does not have an ideological edge, or embrace some common tropes that too often popular video treatments may promote such as science the saviour, science the moneymaker, science the spoiler, science the monster-maker, ... or that science is uncontrollable, is

The mission of universities is thinking : teaching students to think and enabling scholars to think about the world we live in. Yet, it is debatable whether most universities in the world achieve these goals. Arguably, things are getting worse. Universities are flailing. Why? Most universities desperately want to be elite. They want to be like Harvard, Caltech, Oxford, Princeton, Berkeley, Stanford, ... But non-elite universities do not have the necessary resources to be elite. Yet they are controlled by elites (management on high salaries, faculty educated at elite universities) who want to be elite and so settle for elite imitation. "A flailing university is what happens when the principal cannot control its agents. The flailing university cannot implement its own plans and may have its plans actively subverted when its agents work at cross-purposes. The non-elite university flails because it is simultaneously too large and too small: too large because the non-elite university a

 One of the biggest questions in biology is, What is the relationship between genotypes and phenotypes? In different words, how does a specific gene (DNA sequence) encode information that allows a very specific biological structure with a unique function to emerge? Like big questions in many fields, this is a question about emergence. In biology, this mapping from genotype to phenotype occurs at many levels from protein structure to human personality. An example is how the RNA encodes the structure of a SARS-CoV2 virion. A fascinating thing about biological structures is that many have a certain amount of symmetry. The human body has reflection symmetry and many virions have icosahedral symmetry. What is the origin of this tendency to symmetry? Could evolution produce it? Scientists will sometimes make statements such as the following about evolution. Symmetric structures preferentially arise not just due to natural selection but also because they require less specific information to e