Not too long ago I found myself in a red—a very deep red—state, for a research trip. It’s the sort of place where they feel compelled to post on the […]
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I’ve just gotten around to reading closely Marilynne Robinson’s most recent collection of essays—When I Was a Child I Read Books. Robinson, maybe our best novelist, is a challenging writer. […]
The hard truth is this: With 3 percent of the world’s population, the US can no longer expect to run the world. This is because Asia, which has 60 percent of the global population, is no longer underperforming.
A common perception is that ‘older people’ (whatever age that is) do not adopt technology as quickly as younger users. It appears some preferences may be ageless. Consider the e-book […]
Is a life lived without asking why a more impoverished life? There’s the question.
As we head out into the future we know that we can predict certain kinds of disruptive technologies.
Before artificial light was bent to our will, most people would retire shortly after dusk, sleep for four or five hours, awaken for an hour or two, then drift back […]
A team of researchers has figured out a way to use nanotechnology to create images at the highest dots-per-inch resolution possible. Such images could be used for anti-counterfeiting or high-density data encoding.
Let’s suppose you are running the perfect state, the perfect government. You would want to go on a little world tour before you got down to business to see the […]
41 million Americans sleep fewer than six hours each night. But it wasn’t always this way.
How many forms does it take to put a kid on a bus to summer camp? I’m a fan of civil juries as informal vehicles for wealth redistribution and justice, […]
No snark, no sarcasm, no judgement, just the genuine, honest answers to 22 creationist messages. “In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; […]
A team of German and Swiss researchers have created a new tool that helps control when neurons in the brain fire, improving on a groundbreaking procedure called optogenetics.
I hated the idea, the underlying premise of documentary filmmaking, hated it.
Inspired by the unique structure of the Blue Morpho’s iridescent wings, a Vancouver-based company has created an anti-counterfeiting technology that leaps several steps ahead of holography.
It is so easy now to mock the millions who freaked out at the “War of the Worlds”, the Halloween radio play 75 years ago this week about an […]
His latest novel, Joyland, will be released on June 4 in print form only. Ironically, in 2000 King was one of the first major writers to make a story of his available exclusively in e-book form.
The Solar Electric Scooter can be charged by leaving it in bright sunlight or plugging it into a power outlet or external charger.
A study of participant data from the citizen science project GLOBE at Night shows that on average, people’s observations of artificial night sky brightness were surprisingly accurate compared with satellites.
More often than not it’s the one lone instrument, person, human that senses something that no one else does.
If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time you’ll probably be familiar with the name Sokal from the Sokal affair, the scandal in 1996 in which physicist […]
Even securing the most basic humanitarian rights for Syrian refugees would require committing tens of thousands of ground troops and escalating the conflict to global levels, say security experts.
No matter what industry you’re in, chances are you have a few products or services in your line that are commodities. From food and beverage items to household products to […]
Daniel Dennett has posted a fantastic set of “seven tools for thinking” in an article in the Guardian that has gone so viral that if you haven’t seen it yet, […]
One of the reasons Joseph Campbell’s work in comparative mythology continues to resonate—some, myself included, would argue grow—is due to his ability to synthesize religious and spiritual traditions from around […]
A new paper published in Perspectives in Psychological Science (open access) suggests there is “a fundamental design flaw that potentially undermines any causal inference” in much psychology research. The paper […]
What the average person in the Westernized world considers to be a big problem is rarely aligned with reality.
NASA’s recent discovery of two Earth-like planets within the Kepler-62 solar system – the most Earth-like planets ever detected – is creating excitement in the scientific community that we’re close to finding […]
Sometimes what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker.
In Poynton, a shared-space concept has resulted in a revitalized village center where all manner of traffic — gas-powered, human-powered, and anything in between — is treated with respect.