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A recent column by Katha Pollitt, The Atheist's Dilemma, laments how atheists would like to take away what people value and offer nothing in return: But if all you can offer people is reasons to quit their religion—which also often means their community, their family, their support system and ...
In its issue of 22 April 1996, the New Yorker Magazine published a parody map of Montana, by cartoonist Roz Chast. The state ranks 4th in surface (after Alaska, California and Texas), but 44th in population, giving it the 3rd lowest population density (before Wyoming and Alaska). This ...
Q: How do you get a blonde out of a tree? A: Wave According to this map – and if you really believe that blondes have less brains –a nasty fall like that is more likely to happen in the central parts of Norway, Sweden and Finland, where at least 80% of the population is fair-haired, the ...
“Is this what will become of the Earth’s surface?” asks the entry for 22 September 2007 of Astronomy Picture of the Day, a website affiliated with Nasa (judging from its url).“The surface of the Earth is broken up into several large plates that are slowly shifting. About 250 million years ago, the ...
Be glad they don’t have coffee-tables in the Tube, métro, subway and U-Bahn, otherwise you wouldn’t have any excuse not to take this book with you on your subterranean peripatations. ‘Transit Maps of the World’ is an expansion of the earlier ‘Metro Maps of the World’ and was published at the end ...
In October 2002, a dramatic find exploded onto the scene in the field of Biblical archaeology. At a Washington press conference, Hershel Shanks, editor and publisher of the Biblical Archaeology Review, presented a large audience with what he called "the first ever archaeological discovery to ...
They did a lot of crazy stuff in the Sixties, man. Especially at universities like Berkeley, a hotbed of political radicalism, of experiments with free love and cheap drugs (or was that cheap love and free drugs?) and of… map reviews. This is the verbatim text of such a review from the Berkely ...
Pope Benedict has released the second encyclical of his papacy, a 75-page missive titled "Spe Salvi" (Latin for "in hope we are saved"). As was widely reported, this statement attacks atheism and calls people to convert to Roman Catholicism as the only hope for humankind. (Here's the text of the ...
Over 18.000 votes have been cast in a poll to determine once and for all the answer to the burning question: Combien de bises? That’s French for ‘How many kisses’, and kissing in France is a lot more complex the French’s somewhat overstated reputation for carefree libidinosity implies. Unlike ...
The proximity to, the ‘otherness’ of and the seemingly eternal conflict with the barbarian tribes across the Rhine stoked Imperial Rome’s interest in all matters German. To get a sense of the horror and fascination the Germans exerted on the Romans, think cowboys (Rome) and indians (Germany ...
Falsifiability and the Burden of Proof "Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies. You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if you did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove ...
Creating and then manufacturing the Next Big Thing in the world of consumer gadgets is more difficult and complex than you might at first guess. Wired Magazine has put together a behind-the-scenes look at the design of consumer gadgets called The Birth of a Gadget. The article outlines some of ...
For those of you who are interested in this sort of thing, I have a new post up on Dangerous Intersection, "Joe Klein is not a journalist".
Last month, while I was on vacation in Puerto Rico, I had a chance to visit the great radio observatory at Arecibo. That was one of the highlights of my trip, but there was another. Puerto Rico has the only tropical rainforest in the United States national park system. On the northeast coast of ...
In the current issue of Portfolio magazine, former Intel CEO Andy Grove suggests that corporate behemoths - sometimes, but not always - may be better suited to disruptive innovation than smaller, more nimble upstarts: "In my position as a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, I’ve ...