Sidetracked Charley

Paradigm Shift by Skydancer Was looking at my blog stats and noticing that ones where I deal with art or science seem to be the most popular. Mind you my readership is not huge on Sidetracked Charley. My followers on this blog are less than a third of my followers on Creative Journey. I can only assume that more people are interested in my poetry and art and opinions on such than they are on the follies in my life. And so it should be. I do not pretend to be a reality show. But I digress. I was going to write about paradigm shift. One of my favorite scientific theories. Well, next to chaos theory. And I have become rather enamored of late with queuing theory, but those are other blogs for other days. Paradigm shift (or revolutionary science ) is the term used by Thomas Kuhn in his influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) to describe a change in the basic assumptions, or paradigms , within the ruling theory of science . Since the 1960s, the term has als...

President Abraham Lincoln And what, pray tell (or is that prey tell?) does a long dead former president of the United States have to do with my week? Well, I watched the PBS documentary by Ken Burns on the Civil War on Netflix streaming video. I am not sure war should be viewed on high definition television even if there is only black and white stills of its horrors. And Hollywood thinks I would go see a movie about 9/11? What are they thinking? I was thinking. This nine part series really got me thinking in so many directions. You think you know the history of something and then you read a book or see a documentary and know that you had only part of the truth. It was the bloodiest war America ever fought. 600,000 lives were lost. And the north was only partly invested in the activity. So the civil war was my background music, as it were, last week. I was, as I have said on Facebook, a social butterfly. I seem to shun invitations and then they cluster around an event in the ca...