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Human behavior in a post-rational world
I buy books. I also have written a book. So I have a more-than-idle interest in this week's giant-monster fight over ebooks, which pitted Amazon against the big publisher Macmillan and, indirectly, Steve Jobs. My first thought as an author was for the African proverb ("when elephants fight, it ...
The Dalai Lama was stumped. He thought he knew about the mind, he said, but he'd never heard of the mental experience about which he'd been asked. Yet here was a roomful of people to whom it was familiar as hunger or thirst. What, he wanted to know, is this self-hatred of which you speak? It ...
Science is full of surprises. Like penicillin. And X-rays. And LSD. And the cosmic background radiation that is our best evidence for the "Big Bang" origin of the universe. Ever since the original "eureka" moment, serendipity--the source of discoveries made while seeking, or expecting, something ...
The American Museum of Natural History has produced a handy video map of the entire known universe, all to scale. Hypnotically fascinating (it's a reminder, for one thing, that over big distances, space travel and time travel are the same thing). And totally safe for work, unless you're part of ...
They'd make an odd dinner party: The 12th century polymath Saint Hildegard of Bingen; James Doohan (aka Scotty from Star Trek); an American sociologist named James Cooke Brown; J.R.R. Tolkien; Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, inventor of the calculus; the feminist science-fiction author Suzette Haden ...
Royal Caribbean International is continuing to dock its luxury cruise ships on the beaches near Labadee in Haiti, near the epicenter of the earthquake. Some passengers are queasy about this. As one put it: "I just can't see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and ...
If you're worried about Google tracking everything you do with its services, then you should know about Moxie Marlinspike's new Firefox add-on, Googlesharing. And if you aren't worried, maybe you should start. Google records and analyzes data about anything you send it--searches, translations ...
Embryonic stem cells can transform themselves into any kind of cell, including neurons. But neurons made out of stem cells won't be much use if, after implantation, they don't connect properly other brain cells. And no one had yet proven that this connection could be made. Now, though, that ...
I have nothing against the development of sex robots. They're a logical next step in the history of technology's application to sexual desire. No doubt they will be a great comfort some day to the elderly, the shy and people with exotic tastes. What weirded me out about Douglas Hines' new product ...
About 50,000 years ago, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Spain, somebody (or bodies) was keeping carefully ground-up pigments--red, yellow, orange and shiny black--in neatly pierced seashells. That's evidence, says this paper, that these people wore cosmetics, which means it's evidence of ...
Do you want to help suffering Haitians, but find yourself hesitating, because someone might thank God for your good deed? I didn't think so, but the Richard Dawkins Foundation has decided you're out there. It just set up Non-Believers Giving Aid, a "religion-free'' disaster-relief fund, where ...
There has been some pushback about that Nature paper which claimed there's a power-law "signal'' in the seemingly random events of guerrilla wars against standing armies. They really don't like this idea over at Danger Room. The other day Katie Drummond launched a head-on assault, repeating her ...
Ron Bluntschli, an American who works with Haitian farmers through the organization Beyond Borders, told me this story years ago: "When I lived in the country there was a family near us that was very, very poor. They might not start their fire for three days, which meant they didn’t eat for three ...
A new study finds doctors who are stressed and tired treat their patients more mechanistically--prescribing pills, tests and other technical fixes instead of taking the time to see people as people. I guess this won't surprise parents, teachers, cops or other people who deal with the public, but I ...
Ariel Levy's review in The New Yorker of Elizabeth Gilbert's Committed repeats a common truism about marriage: That marriage ties originally were about lowering everyone's personal threat level. In ancient times, Levy writes, "A web of families connected through marriage produced a clan of people ...