Mistaken Identities

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I'm away this week so here's some fun/interesting stuff to check out:

• I'm reading "The Invention of Nature" by Andrea Wulf about Alexander von Humboldt, right now he's up to some shenanigans in the Amazon. He and his companion, Bonpland went to "discover" the link between the Orinoco and the Amazon River, only to find that it was already well-known to the people in the region. (Sort of reminds of the the "discovery" of Victoria Falls shown above* or Columbus "discovering" the Americas...) 

• Who was the first woman in space? Not Sally Ride (ride, Sally Ride!... sorry) but Valentina Tereshkova, who is pretty cool.

• All the buzz about the author of The Bell Curve** got me thinking again about the Mismeasure of Man, a book by Stephen Jay Gould (not Screamin' Jay Hawkins). Then somehow I got lost in the Wikipedia page about the Flynn Effect and the weird stats of IQ testing, which was fun.

• Here is yet another plum quote*** for you about confirmation bias, this time from Karl Popper (not of penguins fame).

“The method of science is the method of bold conjectures and ingenious and severe attempts to refute them.”



• Finally, I recently got creamed at chess and then I learned the word zugswang in a different context, which brought both satisfaction and fresh humiliation.

* In the stamp image it sort of looks like Livingstone is getting airlifted out of Victoria Falls by some heartier explorers, but the travel hammock was actually a common form of transport in the colonial era.

** The recent incident at Middlebury and its terrible repurcussions.

*** Cherry-picked, of course. Am I guilty of confirmation bias in my sampling of quotes about confirmation bias?