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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • Hasok Chang, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, wrote a wonderful book Is Water H2O? In it he traces the historical and philosophical twists and turns to get from water to H2O. Along the way, he reckons with and treats seriously competing theories other than what emerged as the winner.

    In the end, he doesn’t disagree with the role of H2O in water. Rather, he shows how the process of scientific theory making is benefited from a pluralistic view through s repetitive process of challenge and theory adjustment.

    I mainly made the comment because we shouldn’t always assume what we were shown in high school captures the deeper process of insight creation.

    He deals with the weekly emergent qualities like surface tension. We might be able to say that surface tension is one property of wetness even.

    But I also think that water is one of the few phenomena that seems to actually have a strongly emergent qualities. Which is to say, there’s qualities that are in water that are not explainable by the properties of its component parts.

    Ultimately, one of Chang’s goals it to contextualize and not reduce these scientific concepts for greater insights.

    To be more accurate, I don’t think it’s wrong to say that water is more than just H2O. To get gestalt, we should say water is something other than the sum of its parts, H2O.

















  • He’s a new manager working through a merger. He may be friendly and approachable, but he’s got a lot on his plate.

    He asked everyone to stay in their position. you applied for a new position. In his eyes, what kind of impression might you have made? Now he may still be friendly and approachable. More than likely, he saw it and said, “I don’t have time for this.”

    If you want a change and need to do it through your manager, figure out what his problems are and if you can be helpful. If not, just do your job well. Then when the difficulties of the merger have balanced out, you may have space to ask again.

    During a merger, things are complicated and messy. He has pressures that you may not be aware of. Advancing in your workplace often requires soft skills. They may seem mercurial and difficult, but it’s just a set of skills.

    As for thicker skin, first feel what is happening. Don’t try to change it or wish it different. Gather data about how your emotional mind works and work with what it is and not what everyone says it should be.