Experimental Blog # 219

Quotations and notes from "A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived" - The Human Story Retold Through Our Genes by Adam Rutherford

"Something on the order of 107 billion modern humans have existed, though this number depends on when exactly you start counting. < > The species Homo sapiens < > emerged a mere 300,000 years ago, as far as we know, in pockets in the east and north of Africa."

"The seven billion of us alive today are, according to all the evidence available to us, the last remaining group of human great apes from a set of at least four that existed 50,000 years ago. < > Earlier people had been loitering around the continent{Europe} for up to 2 million years. < > Homo  erectus < > had great success leaving < > Africa and making it < > as far east as Java, and all over western Europe."

Mathematics and geneticists agree that, "... merely 600{???} years ago. Sometime at the end of the thirteenth century lived a man or woman from whom all Europeans could trace ancestry < > if we could document the total family tree of everyone alive back through 600 years, < > everyone European alive would be able to select a line that would cross everyone else's around the time of Richard II." Richard II lived from 1367 to 1400.??? 600 years ago would be 1417, which is in the 15th century. 1367 would be in the 14th century.

Beyond Europe it seems "that the most recent common ancestor of everyone alive on Earth" today, no matter how remote or isolated they might be, lived somewhere in Asia and not more that 3,600 years ago.

Experimental Blog # 218

Quotations from "The Forgotten Genius of Oliver Heaviside" - A Maverick of Electrical Science by Basil Mahon

"Oliver Heaviside, who lived from 1850 to 1925 < > founded much of the subject of electrical engineering as it is taught and practiced today: every textbook and every college course bears his stamp."

"I{Oliver Heaviside wrote} hold the view that it{that is, mathematics}is essentially an experimental science, like any other, and should be taught observationally, descriptively, and experimentally."

" ... someone had to bridge the gap between the world of the scholarly scientist and that of the practical-minded engineer."
"What gave Heaviside the power to bridge the great chasm was his unique approach to mathematics. To him, symbols and equations were not pale abstractions but components in a vivid picture of the physical world."

"The advance of electrical communications in the past hundred years is the greatest leap of knowledge in humankind's history. Radio, television, radar, cell phones, the Internet, satellite navigation: each has been turned from ambitious idea into everyday tool at incredible speed. With astounding skill and ingenuity, scientists and engineers have created hundreds of wonderful new devices and techniques ... < > On the face of it, we have left Heaviside way behind. But in one important sense it was Heaviside who made it all possible. By bridging what had been a great gulf between theory and practice, he brought advanced electrical science within reach of technologists."