The modern dictator needs only to become a client-state to Russia or China (or to be Russia or China), and there is nothing he can’t get away with. We members of open societies have the power to change that. All we need is the resolve.
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It was the most promising idea for where new physics might lie. Now that the LHC data is in, is it dead? “The revolution is not an apple that falls when […]
When all the galaxies, stars, gas, dust, dark matter and all the other forms of matter and radiation are summed together, its energy still pales in comparison to dark energy. […]
We normally think of the Big Bang as the very beginning of our Universe, but we now know the story goes back even before it. Here’s how. “The aim of science […]
The mechanism for changing your mindset through messaging is the same as for changing a physical behavior: a targeted and limited resolution practiced relentlessly until it becomes automatic.
Last week, I invited a few friends to come together and talk about Bitcoin. The conversation was wide ranging (read: ill-organized), but interesting. Three key topics emerged out of the […]
A disquieting paper has been published in the journal Criminal Justice Ethics, that suggests the decisions of forensic scientists are being influenced by payments for convictions. The authors Roger Koppl […]
A few months ago I posted a piece which has become my most popular blog post by quite a landslide.The postcovered various techniques for learning and looked at the empirical […]
Ramez Naam looks at the power of innovation to overcome natural resource and environmental challenges.
Scott Barry Kaufman (@sbkaufman) is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU, co-founder of The Creativity Post, Scientific American blogger, and a friend. He is also the author of Ungifted: Intelligence […]
The feeling of certainty might be our default setting. We spend most of our mental life confirming our opinions, even when those opinions involve complex issues. We believe we understand […]
Very few countries allow direct-to-consumer advertising by drug companies, but in those that do (New Zealand, Canada, and the U.S.), the medicine-buying public has been brainwashed to believe that mental […]
Can the study of art history stop looking like ancient history itself? Can it transcend the old approaches and embrace the digital world? As digitized as art history has become […]
Fellow pseudonymous neuroblogger Neuroskeptic(to whom I owe a great deal in inspiration) has published a fantastic piece in Trends in Cognitive Sciences ($) on the benefits to science of anonymity. Last November Neuroskeptic became […]
First things first – I’m not a doctor, but the surprise new rules issued by the GMC (the British regulator for doctors) still worry me. Not just because I might perhaps one day […]
The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]
Last week, voters in Los Angeles County passed a referendum requiring male actors in adult films to wear condoms in scenes depicting vaginal or anal intercourse. Measure B was an […]
Update (Jan, 2014): Amir’s patent application (search for no. 12/743357) has been rejected due to prior art by Mathews and MacLeod. Update (Feb, 2013): Following this blog post Amir corrected two […]
To celebrate her Jubilee year, the Queen had a large chunk of Antarctica named after her; possibly upsetting the Argentinians and Chileans.
Several years ago Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid teamed with violinist, composer and neuroscientist Dave Soldier to explore popular music preferences in the United States. They determined what music people […]
Here’s a little philosophy/psychology experiment you can try for yourself. It just takes a few minutes, and the rest of this post will make much more sense if you do […]
One year ago I wrote an article for Big Think with the title walking across campus whilst sitting on your couch in which I introduced my readers to the AnyBot, […]
Leaving aside a few notable exceptions, the reactions to the latest UN Conference on Sustainable Development—Rio+20, as it’s widely known—read like a collective obituary for global governance. Mark McDonald catalogued […]
I’ll be honest. I’d hoped to hold out a bit longer before falling back on this staple of any Asian culture column, but it was unavoidable in this case. The […]
First of all, I am not an analyst nor do I own any stock in any public company. The last time I did invest in a promising Internet company ended […]
The weekend is a good time to get some culture, and since there are a lot of things lately that I’m enjoying, I figured I’d write one completely miscellaneous post […]
Why is democracy so difficult? Could be because it demands that each of us accept, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz said to me way back when I wrote this, “that […]
Richard Dawkins, the most famous “atheist” on the planet, has argued “the existence of God is a scientific hypothesis like any other.”
Following the demise of cap and trade legislation, green group leaders acknowledged that despite spending several hundred million dollars to pass the bill, they were unable to create public demand […]
I’d be happy to make a bet with real money that Marx was just plain wrong about immiseration, and will continue to be proved wrong.