“I demonstrate by means of philosophy that the earth is round, and is inhabited on all sides; that it is insignificantly small, and is borne through the stars.” – Johannes Kepler
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“The aim of life is to live, and to live means to be aware, joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.” – Henry Miller (born on this date in 1891)
“The freethinking of one age is the common sense of the next.” – Matthew Arnold (born on this date in 1822)
“New capabilities emerge just by virtue of having smart people with access to state-of-the-art technology.” – Internet pioneer Robert Kahn (born on this date in 1938)
“Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.”- George Eliot
“People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.” – Rebecca West (born on this date in 1892)
William McDonough’s most profound concept is “Harvest of Value,” the basic notion that everything is a resource for something else. Simply put, waste equals food – the waste of one system becomes food for another.
“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.” – Emily Dickinson (born on this date in 1830)
Researchers used thermal infrared sensors to pinpoint the record-setting pockets on a high ridge of the East Antarctic Plateau. The record low: minus 136 F (minus 93.2 C), set on August 10, 2010.
Oklahoma City, the “buckle of the Bible Belt,” may soon have a monument to Satan on its statehouse steps.
Warning: this video might drive you a little bit nuts. Even after you realize that it is messing with your head, the optical illusion in the video will continue to convince you to believe that two squares are identical. What a reminder of how easily we are fooled!
The chemical, oxytocin, that makes us want to cuddle, also makes us very suspicious of out-groups, people who are not in our relationship.
Some people say, “I went white water rafting in Canada and I felt alive” or “I went to Thailand and I felt alive.” Proust’s lesson is, “I lay in bed, and by looking at things properly, I felt properly alive.”
That painting is not complete until the viewer responds to it.
This illustration represents the possible extent of an ancient lake inside Gale Crater on Mars. Examination of mudstone confirmed the exist of the lake which formed billions of years ago.
Whoever the enemy is perceived to be, they are still a human being. Mandela spoke of peace and actively promoted forgiveness and reconciliation.
A lawsuit is demanding certain rights for a 26-year-old chimpanzee named Tommy on the basis that personhood derives from cognitive and emotional qualities that chimpanzees, like humans, possess in abundance.
Answer: Hormones. That’s true, but not the whole predicament. Middle school has issues. The problem is often folded into a larger, if illusory, “problem” of the U.S. public school system […]
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..” ― John Milton
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 […]
When it comes to making predictions, thinkers who are hedgehogs barely beat “dart-throwing chimps.” Despite that, hedgehogs hog the spotlight.
There is nothing qualitatively different about the way the internet is changing our human experience now than the way the invention of writing did some thousands of years ago.
Alva Noë: Too many cognitive scientists tend to take a 17th century conception of the person as an individual island trapped inside his or her head and we need to break free of that.
Places that today aren’t really seeing a particular water challenge, are absolutely going to have problems if we don’t change our ways.
2.5 billion people in the world don’t have access to improved sanitation.
So we need to stop thinking about a waste water stream as pure waste and look at it as an asset.
Jim Kakalios: Personally, I’d like to be able to catch my thought every now and then.
Physicists trying to develop a quantum theory of gravity have found that they needed to dust off the “many worlds interpretation” and apply it to their theories in order to make them work out.
By the middle of the next decade, we believe we can reach a tipping point where the competitive advantages of microgravity will become more widely accepted and more widely known.
In order to venture further and further out we’re going to have to have crews that can withstand the rigors of space for years at a time.