Today I Learned:
1) Did a little bit of squirrel-watching today. After I got a squirrel used to my presence, I watched it gallivanting around its tree for a while. I'm guessing it was male, though I didn't check the obvious way, because it kept snuzzling its cheeks against the branches in a decidedly territory-marking (though adorable) way. I *also* saw it stop at leaves several times, kind of bite or taste the base of the leaf, then move on. "Why would it be trying to eat a leaf?" I wondered. "Squirrels don't eat leaves." Then it did the little tasting thing to a leaf, but instead of leaving it be, the squirrel nipped it off just under the base of the leaf and carried it away up the tree. It didn't actually get it very far -- it dropped the leaf after a couple of feet of speed-climbing -- but I'm guessing that it was looking for leaves from which to make a nest.
2) The ocular harpsichord was a contraption conceived by Louis Bertrand Castel to make music with colors. The idea was that it was a keyboard that produced colors instead of sound. Castel claimed that there was a fundamental... metaphor, I suppose is the word... between sound and color, and that with the appropriate mapping you could make music out of color that could be appreciated as music. The ocular harpsichord was probably never built during Castel's life, and the reason why gets to the fundamentals of Castel's philosophy, which throws some contrast on our modern scientific philosophy.
Castel was a natural philosopher in the burgeoning first age of natural philosophers. His contemporaries included the likes of Voltaire, Hooke, and Newton. Castel was a bit of an old-fashioned natural philsopher, though. He heavily critiqued Newton for his straightforward, fact-based presentation style and for his reliance on experiment and mathematics. Yeah, Castel didn't like the idea of getting knowledge from experimentation. He believed that truth should be understood through the accumulation of everyday, real-world experience. According to Castel, laboratory experiments were almost always unnatural scenarios, and therefore not to be trusted.
Castel preferred science by metaphor -- real truth, he argued, could only be arrived at through analogy to commonplace, everyday, oft-experienced phenomena. The truth of light, for instance, could best be arrived at by analogy to something else well-understood -- sound, for example. Newton's prisms experiments, by contrast, Castel viewed as unnatural setups yielding unnatural results unlikely to reveal the real truth of things. Castel wasn't interested in proving theories right or wrong by experiment, but rather in finding connections between phenomena well-grounded in experience. That's why he wasn't keen on building an actual ocular harpsichord -- the point of it was that it was a thought experiment that revealed something of the natures of sound and light. Actually building one would be like building a working example of the trolley problem. Er. Bad example, perhaps -- more like making a... hmm... why does it seem like all the best thought experiments involve morally dubious setups? Anyway, building one wasn't the point.
The above four paragraphs were distilled from the following article, linked to me by Chigozie Nri late last night: http://ift.tt/1JJf4qr
3) From the same source as above, the cat organ was a terrible contraption built by an Italian musician of the 17th century. It was a keyboard instrument hooked to a bank of caged cats, picked out for the pitch of their meows and arranged in increasing order. When a key was struck, it would drive a nail into the tail of one of the cats, causing it to shriek with specifically-pitched pain. By all period accounts, it never failed to get a laugh. If you want to know how a vegetarian feels about the slaughter of animals for tasty food, just remember that people built and enjoyed the cat organ.
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