Word: phenomena
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...looking for america, there's no need to buy a Greyhound bus ticket - just drop in at London's Hayward Gallery before mid-September. Photographers Ansel Adams and William Eggleston reveal the country's awe-inspiring natural phenomena, as well as the lurid traces of human occupation...
...soiled kid's bag, a creaky elevator, leaks from the ceiling: not the sort of phenomena likely to scare movie audiences out of their seats. But the great horror films have always laced the stuff of ordinary life with a dose of terror, for the deepest fears derive not from the wildly grotesque, but from the slightly twisted familiar. Terror is a thing of the mind, not the eyes, and the line between mundane normality and unbridled horror can be as thin as that between dusk and night...
...about Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Streaks in sports, Gould noted, should command our appreciation not because a player gets a hot hand or a magic rhythm--these are cognitive illusions--but because his level of skill increases the odds of a lucky run. All long-lived phenomena are "games of a gambler playing with a limited stake against a house with infinite resources... DiMaggio activated the greatest and most unattainable dream of all humanity, the hope and chimera of all sages and shamans: he cheated death, at least for a while." This was Gould at his best...
...began exploring hundreds of different kinds of cellular automata and was astonished to find that the patterns emerging from his computer resembled all sorts of scientific phenomena--the subatomic trails emerging from a particle accelerator, the diagrams of curved space-time that arise from Einstein's equations, the spread of evolutionary changes in organisms through time, the graphic equivalent of different kinds of mathematical logic. "Under every conceptual rock I turned over," says Wolfram, "there's been this amazing wildlife I never expected to find...
Coupled with the fact that conventional equations can describe only the simplest natural phenomena (you can write an equation for the orbit of a single planet around the sun, for example, but not for an entire solar system, let alone a living cell), the success of his simple programs made Wolfram suspect that science has been heading in the wrong direction for the past 300 years or so. Instead of trying to write complicated equations for everything, he says, scientists should have been searching instead for the cellular automata that correspond to what they are observing...