For parents who have trouble making the kids go to bed on time, like I do myself:

These past two nights, I lured the kid into bed with "Aurora Borealis" made with three really garish coloured rhinestones and a small flash-light (and with a plate of water & a plate of water and vegetable oil, since I was curious about how the images would change). Put the rhinestones on the floor or into the plate (they float between water and oil, but if you press on them, they sink) and direct light onto them (swishing them around, holding the light closer or farther, nudging them - sometimes, in water/oil, they overlapped) so that there is a reflection on the ceiling. (You can just oil them, it gets a sharper gleam than non-treated 'stones.)

I am going to buy some identical ones and try coating one with colourless nail polish, one with oil, and try adding salt to the water (or glycerine... or chlorophyll solution in ethanol... or benzene...) to see if there will be some change in my "Aurora". Good thing the kid is five and I have some time to brush up on my optics:)

If much effort should be invested in the initial search for hypotheses/explanations, before they are weighed against each other, then how come there are apparently so few cases where more than two major hypotheses are proposed?

I mean, I don't know much about the history of physics, but I do remember being surprised by the (relatively) many models of the Structure of the Atom we heard about in chronological order. And there used to be lots more Trees of Life, back in the XIXth century. But I cannot, on the fly, think of crazy-but-who-knows things of today (well, except for the Search for Ancestors of Angiosperms, it just goes on).

Has anyone here had associations/subjective feelings about subjects of study? (Probably in high school, where the range of subjects is wide and students' attitudes depend on the teachers' images, to some degree.) I tended to like algebra, because solving equations and the like reminded me of gradual shifts of attention in yoga-style exercise - flowing, ordered and always seeking the point of balance. Geometry, I took for a much more "masculine" discipline, a form of exercise in endurance, and was not fond of it. Of course, calculus messed things up...:)

Why do you think that reading a history of how people who didn't know what DNA was thought about taxonomy will help dissolving the question?

It seems to me that the history of biological systematics/taxonomy is a great source of material for a study on dissolving the question (but I am neither a systematicist nor a historian). Are there any popular intros into the field that don't focus on individual botanists of the past? Serebryakov's "Morphology of plants", printed half a century ago, has a nice section on history, but it is limited in scope (and not quite "popular"). Other books often just list the people and what they did without interconnecting them, which is boring.

When my grandfather died, they would have sold his library, but Mother put her foot down and we had it sent to us instead. Simply mailing it cost (us) more than €1000 - a sum wonderfully outside my experience of directly spending - and on the border we had to unload the boxes and show the books to customs officers. Grampa'd really liked his swashbucklers, too, so the officers were probably impressed... Anyway, that day I learned to enjoy as much as possible out of buying experiences, helping others, and paying now - consuming later... It just helps, ok?:)

Ah that particular idea of all human pleasures being harmful for the environment is pretty much religious. It's not at all what the impact is like.

Computing is basically blameless in the direct sense for global warming. We should probably enjoy it as much as possible. Electricity is good. Trains are good. Holidaying is good.

Airconditioning is bad. Air travel is bad. Short product lifetime is bad.

The situation is far more positive than some make it out to be. Even the direst climate change predictions necessitates drastic changes in some aspects of life.

AGW can't take away modern medicine or virtual reality from you.

No I don't think, but still Dunbar number are not an exact quantity, first, and second: if you only need to relate to a handful of comrade in your platoon and one higher ranking official, then you can effectively restrict the number of people with whom you have to interact.

Just a note, posting here because some people might have participated in something similar (if so, what were your impressions?):

...Unfortunately, at the all-Soviet [mathematics] Olympiads they failed to implement another idea, which A. N. Kolmogorov put forward more than once: to begin one of the days of the contest with a lecture on a previously unfamiliar, to the participants, topic and then offer several problems which would build on the ones considered during the lecture. (Such an experiment was successfully carried out only once […] in 1985 […] the lecture was on geometric probabilities.)

N.Vasilyev, A.A.Yegorov. Problems of All-Soviet mathematical olympiads. - Moscow, 1988. - p. 14 of 286.

Not necessarily, and after all military hierarchies are a way to cope with the complexity of managing thousands of peopla at a time.