Sci&Tech History

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Charles Babbage applied binary numbers to a calculating machine. In 1890, the binary system was developed by Hermann Hollerith which invented punch card, going back to an invention by the early nineteenth-century Frenchman J-M. Jacquard. The invention makes conversion from numbers into instructions possible. Several years later, [...]

Diesel start his invention with an idea to built a perfect engine working according Carnot’s thermodynamic principles and could occur without an increase in temperature by inventing new ways of injecting and burning fuel. What Diesel did is not as simple as turning paper and patent into a prototype, but also convinces other actors to [...]

What happened if a turkish astronomer dressed in his traditional national costume, demonstrate the existence of asteroid B 612 in front of his colleagues? In The Little Prince, a fiction book written by Saint-Exupery, the answer of the question are scorn and laughter. While when he dressed up with three-pieces suit(trousers, shirt and a tie), [...]

Nowadays, food safety is becoming an issue. Expired date, its composition, organic or not are few things that influence people decision, rather to buy a product or not. Food processing techniques which also influence the expired date develop along with human abilities. In 1870s, boron usages were widely used in milk, butter, and cream. Later, [...]

Another approach to describe how knowledge spread is by using translation models. Its concept can be observed by seeing how messenger RNA(mRNA) in a bacteria E.Coli works. The knowledge or information that was initiated by someone won’t spread and accepted, if there isn’t an agreement from the others. Translation process occur in sociology of translation, [...]

How can knowledge spread from one community onto another? How advertisements persuade people to buy their product? Gabrial Tarde(1895), a pioneer in doing innovation research, believed the human tendency to imitate fellow beings was the fundamental law of all social phenomena. By seeing it natural phenomena, diffusion was a net movement from high concentration to [...]

Have you ever buy something without getting plastic materials? Unless you buy fried food in the border of a road, it’s a bit rare to buy something without getting plastic as it cover. Human and plastic have a long history. The Egyptians has used resins, natural plastics, to varnish their sarcophagi, and the Greeks made [...]

In a notes so-called Blue Book, Wittgenstein point out that a dictionary is insufficient as a definition of meaning for a language because of its self-reference. For example, the word “regain” in Webster’s 1828 is defined as to recover, as what has escaped or been lost. At the same time the word “recover” is defined [...]

< p class=”MsoNormal” align=”right”>”To know the truth, you must risk everything.”(Trinity, The Animatrix) How do you know that this is the real world, and not only a dream? For Neo in The Matrix trilogy, the question had made him faces the truth that he never imagine before. His daily activities that he percept is not more than [...]

In 1881, French semi-popular and scientific press is full of articles about Pasteur laboratories work. Scientist, journalist, hygienist, focus their attention on a few microbes which observe under microscope. Laboratories became bounder-less because observation was not only done by the scientist in laboratories, but also by journalist which observe the scientist work. The situation became [...]