Fancy Words

Rabindranath Tagore

Astral Codex Ten has a post up about how greatness seems to run in families. It's a fairly long post. The first section is entertaining. He mentions members of several families and what they are famous for.  I have heard of most of them. However, there were a number of terms I didn't recognize, so I looked them up on Google and copied them here.

Bohr effect - hemoglobin's oxygen binding affinity is inversely related both to acidity and to the concentration of carbon dioxide.

Brahmoism - a religious movement which originated from the mid-19th century Bengali Renaissance, the nascent Indian independence movement.

Chaos theory -  in mechanics and mathematics, the study of apparently random or unpredictable behavior in systems governed by deterministic laws.

Cline - in biology, a cline is a measurable gradient in a single character of a species across its geographical range.

Dyson series - near as I can tell, it is some fancy math used to describe how subatomic particles behave.

Dyson sphere - a hypothetical megastructure that completely encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. Emphasis on hypothetical. I've read a bunch of science fiction and I've never come across one of these. This is something so advanced it would make Star Trek look like a story about cave men. Ring World is the closest thing I can think of, and it is still several orders of magnitude smaller. I did come across a story about giant inhabitable hollow sphere, but the main purpose there was to be inhabitable, not to capture energy. Must have been a light source in the center, but it couldn't have been too big or the sphere would not have been inhabitable. I've come across this Dyson Sphere idea before, but I never paid it any mind because it is so far away as to be insignificant. Kind of like Marvel comics.

Dyson's transform is a fundamental technique in additive number theory. Additive number theory is the subfield of number theory concerning the study of subsets of integers and their behavior under addition. More than one mathematician has used Dyson's transform to prove obscure mathematical theorems. Obscure means I'm not going to talk about them here.

Ethnic group -  a community or population made up of people who share a common cultural background or descent. I know what this one is, but it was in quotes like a couple of other terms, so I looked it up.

Hematology - the branch of medicine concerned with the study of the cause, prognosis, treatment, and prevention of diseases related to blood.

Nephrology - the subspecialty of internal medicine that focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of diseases of the kidney.

Transhumanism - a philosophical movement, the proponents of which advocate and predict the enhancement of the human condition by developing and making widely available sophisticated technologies able to greatly enhance longevity, mood and cognitive abilities.

There is also this entertaining note about ratholes: 

His nephew Abanindranath Tagore was a famous artist and the founder of the Indian Society of Oriental Art. His...okay, look, just assume there are an approximately infinite number of Tagores, all of whom have names ending in -dranath, and all of whom have some set of amazing accomplishments in music, art, literature, occasionally science or politics. You can see a list of some of them here, but bring a flashlight and remember to drop bread crumbs behind you, or else you'll never find your way back.

In the following sections he speculates on why some families produce several great people. There might be some reason, but I don't really care. We are making progress in understanding genetics, but we have only scratched the surface. We are a long way from understanding how all the genes and gene  expressions interact. And that's just genetics. A bigger factor is people's minds. While we have a good understanding of basic psychology, the nuances are too subtle to be captured by any kind of statistical analysis.