h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's pretty cool:

http://img.ifcdn.com/images/83e2d749a26bc91223d0003eed7999ac22724265960d8e420f641b44707fc295_1.jpg

Someone looks at a modern day event or phenomenon and analyses the chain of events that led to it happening. I saw a good one online where it looked at Wayne Rooney's injury before the World Cup and traced it back to the shooting of Franz Ferdinand!

Isn't this Chaos Theory?

PP.

I thought it was history.

It sounds similar to the format of James Burke's 'Connections' series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

perhaps 'gestalt' as starting point or node?

He's dead, Jim.


~jwf~

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3k_CgzdR2s

causal analysis

I think ITIWBS has nailed it there.


~jwf~

There was certainly a chain of cause and effect between the commissioning of the "Connections" series and the end of James Burke's television career.

And let us not forget Jacob Brownovski.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man
>> from the flint tool to geometry, agriculture to genetics, and
from alchemy to the theory of relativity, showing how they all
are expressions of our ability to understand and control nature. <<

Or even the pregenitor of the personal TV style, Kenneth Clark,
whose series Civilisation inspired so many to see human history
outside a box of Trivial Pursuit cards and all those serial lists of
the dates and names of Kings and Generals they teach at skool.


~jwf~

If you play poker at breakfast, you are likely to be interested in Kings and General Mills.

C.G. Jung's study on Alchemy demonstrated that Alchemy was rooted in primitive Gnosticism, arguably the first great schism in the history of Christianity, between the ecumenicals, who needed a ceremonial system of deontological precepts to support missionary proselytization and people in the scientific and technical trades and professions, glass makers, metallurgists, physicians and apothecaries, who needed to carry forward the symbolic languages founded in pre-Christian paganism they'd developed to support their occupations, eventually tolerated during the middle ages under a legal fiction of 'trade secrets', with a dramatic increase in openness following the Rennaisance, Alchemy becoming science with the secularization of the Universities.

Sir Isaac Newton was a critical figure in that transformation.

People today often wonder why he would have taken an interest in Alchemy, given his stature as a scientist, forgetting that before Newton, Alchemy was cutting edge technology.

His Alchemical interests were among his qualifications for his position as Treasury Judge, along with his mathematical skills, since he was well equipped to recognize and prove frauds when confronted with them.

His interest in Alchemy was probably initially stimulated by his need for quality glass for his optical experiments.

Quality glass is fundamental to almost everything else in Alchemical technics.

So who was it that transmuted alchemy into science?

Martin Luther's father was a copper smelter, also one of the alchemical trades.

The transformation of values from symbolic and qualitative standards to empiric and quantitative, was something societal and by no means the work of any one person, though many were prominent in the trend, which was also characterised by increased intoleration of unfounded sophistry.

Unfortunately, unfounded sophistry is alive and well in tweets and many online comment boards . You need a thick skin to read some of the stuff that's posted on the Internet.