TED Community » Henk Mulder

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New Thought. Breakthrough Thinking.

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• TEDCred score: +14.20 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A reply on Conversation: Give me one good reason why I should hire you.

  Aug 9 2012: You are completely wrong. I don 't want to work for a boss, that's all. I'm the one that creates work and generate taxes. Discussion closed.

• A reply on Conversation: One CAN ONLY accomplish objectives (period).

  Aug 9 2012: Indeed and I think that a lot of disagreements - including on TED - are due to this divergence in context.
  
  I have found that the best thing one can do when meeting new people, is to work out what their default context is in order to be able to engage constructively.
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  A reply on Conversation: One CAN ONLY accomplish objectives (period).

  Aug 9 2012: Mark, I think we agree completely - within the context of this discussion :)
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  A reply on Conversation: One CAN ONLY accomplish objectives (period).

  Aug 9 2012: When you want to discuss in a single context then you CANNOT use words like ONLY and TRUTH without underlining the fact the this TRUTH is valid ONLY in the context you have chosen.
  
  Instead you define your context and generalize your conclusions to be true outside your context.

• A reply on Conversation: Give me one good reason why I should hire you.

  Aug 9 2012: Correct, unfortunately, the enslavement comes after the hiring

• A reply on Conversation: Is science fiction a laboratory for new ideas, or is the relationship purely coincidental?

  Aug 9 2012: I worked in nuclear science for 10 years and every year 1000's of papers were published on all sorts of exotic subjects. It was a little overwhelming and made me feel very small. Until I realized that papers are scientific currency, much as dollars are business currency. The quality of a scientist os measured, literally, by the number of papers he or she has published. I don't know the exact number but my guess is that 90% of papers are incremental knowledge. A scientist wants to go to this cool conference in Hawaii and must publish to go there. So he takes his last paper and adds a new statistic.
  
  Only a small number of papers are worth reading. They concern real progress and they are the one's that need to be reviewed. Obviously, if you are a scientist who specializes in the changing patterns of veins in the top left corner of the wings of common flies, then you will probably be a critical reader of all papers on that subject but otherwise, we should stay at a high level and only read that which is relevant.

• A comment on Conversation: Give me one good reason why I should hire you.

  Aug 9 2012: Sorry, not for hire, I'm beyond enslavement.
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  A reply on Conversation: Help! Are we really expanding?

  Aug 9 2012: The balloon experiment is just an analogy which illustrates the increasing distance between galaxies etc. But here it stops.
  
  The problem with the Big Bang is that space itself was created and it is space itself that is expanding. For reasons I don't fully comprehend, and i'm not sure anyone does, the universe has no center nor does it have an edge. This is because we are not expanding in space but space it expanding itself.
  
  Add to this the little complexity of the size of the universe. It is so big that light from distant galaxies travels so far that we are not seeing these galaxies as they are today, but as they were when the light left them, sometimes billions of years ago. So, not only is space expanding, time is also a stretchy mess, at least from where we stand.
  
  Most physicists have stopped trying to visualize the cosmos, sub-atomic space and quantum mechanics. Instead they have models that are coherent within that context and they visualize those. The human brain is at present not really capable of visualizing 4+ dimensional space-time, which is what these extreme environments are made of. It's fun trying though :o)
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  A comment on Conversation: Help! Are we really expanding?

  Aug 8 2012: Take balloon and mark it with a lot of dots. Now blow it up and as it expands you'll see all the dots moving away from each other. This only happens with an expanding surface.
  
  Be careful, if you blow too much, there will be a big bang.
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  A reply on Talk: A sense of humor about Afghanistan? Artist Aman Mojadidi shows how

  Aug 8 2012: I am not there yet either. Often we need comedians to allow us to surface difficult subjects. This is one of them. Perhaps it is the start of a process of internal and social conciliation,