The often-overlooked function of our justice system is its putative role. So how far are people willing to go to punish criminals? How many of your own resources would you sacrifice to punish a thief?
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When a German court in Cologne ruled last month that baby boys could not be circumcised for religious reasons, Jewish and Muslim groups erupted in protest while a chorus of […]
If “LA MoCA” sounds to you like something you’d order from Starbucks, then you probably don’t know anything about the recent kerfuffle surrounding what is being called the murder of […]
Derecho Alert!!!!!! AAAIIIGGGHHH!!!! Grab the kids! Run for the basement, quick! As this is being written a line of severe thunderstorms is sweeping across sections of the Northeast […]
On Tuesday, Monsignor William Lynn, former secretary of clergy for the Catholic Archdiocese of Philadelphia, was sentenced to three to six years in prison for his role in shielding pedophile […]
What’s the Big Idea? Lionel Richie is a meme phenomenon. His music video “Hello” has inspired countless people to share both image and video pastiches of him all over the internet. […]
Alison Klayman signed up for the job and that chance meeting flourished into a friendship with Ai Weiwei, China’s most famous avant garde artist turned political activist, during some of the most tumultuous years of his career.
On a late winter day in 1922, the sound of a gun shot resounded with a loud boom in the hills surrounding the house of three-year-old Edgar Curtis. The sound itself wasn’t out of the ordinary, since the Curtises lived near a firing range. What was extraordinary was the question the boy turned to ask his mother: “What is that big, black noise?”
Physicists at the UK’s National Physics Laboratory have created a device which could be scaled to store numerous ion-based quantum bits, paving the way for a quantum computer microchip.
As a predictor of technological change, the little known Wright’s Law outperforms Moore’s Law, which famously (and mostly correctly) states that computer power doubles every 18 months.
Why I Support Guns I submit that there is a rational, human, apolitical argument for supporting gun ownership in America. No prominent supporter of gun use and ownership, nor the […]
A team of MIT and Harvard physicists have successfully turned a laser into a single beam of photons. The advance is essential to creating tomorrow’s quantum computers.
The documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry is the portrait of a man fighting a one-man war of ideas with the Chinese government, daily putting his own life at risk for the sake of the country he loves.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about QR codes and how they could be used in textbooks over at edcetera. Now, IKEA came out with a pretty […]
Scaremail fights government surveillance with the power of nonsense.
I was thinking of former Rep. Anthony Weiner, who is now trying for a political comeback, while driving home from New Haven, listening to a blues hour out of a […]
This year’s winner of the Google Science Fair is 17 year-old Brittany Wenger, who has coded a cloud-based computer program to think like the human brain and locate malignant tumors.
Researchers at Cambridge University have observed chemical reactions at the quantum level for the first time ever by isolating individual atoms and cooling them to incredibly low temperatures.
Corey Milne of WhatCulture.com doesn’t think ‘feminism’ belongs in video games – alongside sex, BDSM, infanticide and so on. As a man, whenever someone mentions feminism I reply with a […]
After President Obama’s announcement at the National Urban League convention in New Orleans yesterday of his latest executive order establishing a new White House initiative on Educational Excellence for African […]
James Taranto is a Wall Street Journal writer now internationally famous as a self-important jerk because of this tweet yesterday about the Aurora killings: “I hope the girls whose boyfriends […]
The massive southern continent was a supposed to be a counterweight for the lands of the northern hemisphere
A number of analysts and scholars of the Middle East have argued that the revolutions and uprisings taking place in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Syria are the first of their […]
The past few years have been tough on economics and economists. In a searing indictment written one year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Paul Krugman concluded that the central […]
What’s the Big Idea? Why do we so often form opinions about things that fly in the face of the evidence? We do this all the time — whether it […]
When discussing moral matters, there are often misconceptions many of us espouse. To gain greater understanding on ethical topics, of your own and your opponents’ views, it’s important to correct […]
New calculations based on the mysterious nature of dark energy suggest the Universe will end by ripping itself apart 6 billion years before the infamous heat death is expected.
An increasing number of American businesses are recognizing the competitive necessity of building and retaining an engaged workforce. Even in a recession, the most talented people will always be attracted to roles at companies where their efforts are clearly appreciated and rewarded.
Since it was launched in 2009, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered more than 700 confirmed planets outside our solar system. Some may be quite appealing to humans in the future.
Jesse Bering is the author of the new book, “Why is the Penis Shaped Like that?: And Other Reflections on Being Human.” He is well known in my circles as […]