In the midst of an intense meditation on Walt Whitman in his Studies in Classic American Literature, D. H. Lawrence suddenly proclaims: The essential function of art is moral. Not […]
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Every May brings with it a new crop of college graduation speeches. This spring, few (maybe none) were as though-provoking as multimedia artist Laurie Anderson’s at the School of Visual […]
I do not want everyone to have the same opinion I have on, basically, anything: from gay marriage to drugs.
What is the Big Idea? Halla Tomasdottir guided her financial services company Audur Capital through Iceland’s economic meltdown in 2008. The company not only survived, but its unique “feminine values” […]
In perhaps this blog’s worst kept secret, I have been writing a book. In fact, I started working on the book before Brian and I even started Waq al-waq. Originally, […]
Space satellite engineers are taking advantage of the power, size and cost of modern consumer electronics to build a new generation of space exploration technology.
The Pentagon’s experimental research and development department, known as DARPA, has put a 100-year time frame on its goal of sending a manned mission to another star.
This is probably your last chance to see Venus cross directly in front of the sun as the event will not reoccur until 2117. Scientists want to gather data to find exoplanets similar to Earth.
Cosmologist Charley Lineweaver argues that the potential diversity of life in outer space requires a change in the definition of life, from biological boundaries to physical ones.
The word’s biggest science experiment has found a home. Well, two homes. Radio telescopes in South Africa and Australia will search for data from the early days of the Universe.
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 […]
Here’s an article by Thomas C. Terry getting a lot of attention on how openly our professors disparage Mormons in ways they would be ashamed to talk about members of […]
Now there’s one more thing that parents can give their children to ensure their future success in life – a digital trust fund. Yep, that’s right, it’s no longer enough for […]
I’ve been thinking in speculative directions lately, and nothing is more speculative than the question of whether we’ll one day be able to extend the human lifespan. The notion of […]
Late on Friday afternoon, AQAP posted this video “appeal” from a Saudi diplomat. The man, Abdullah al-Khalidi, is the deputy Saudi consul in Aden. He was kidnapped several weeks ago […]
Rosalind Franklin was instrumental to the discovery of DNA, but as the film photograph 51 demonstrates, hers was a life out of balance.
The blogosphere won’t stop talking about the Facebook IPO story. The stock (FB), which has been publicly traded for less than 2 weeks, has fallen below $30/share and the bearish […]
What is the Big Idea? Residents of Ciudad Juárez, home of the highest murder rate in Mexico, now have some relief from the violence through a virtual reality therapy program […]
Several video game companies have released mind-reading headsets that let players control virtual objects. Psychiatrists say the technology could help improves patients’ mental health.
What’s the Big Idea? Our Lady of Lourdes appears 18 times to a miller’s daughter collecting firewood in a small market town in France. A young woman leads an army through […]
What’s the Big Idea? What does it mean to be connected in the 21st century? Hope, interdependence, and possibly the creation of a new consciousness, says Tiffany Shlain. Shlain is the […]
To solicit financial support from the public, something the government has made easier recently, it helps to create funding tiers that allow you to connect personally with your audience.
Jane McGonigal discusses the skills we learn from gaming and how can they help us enhance, rather than detract from our ambitions as humans.
What’s the Big Idea? On May 20, Pakistan shut down Twitter for eight hours after the microblogging site refused to remove tweets that linked to a page encouraging people to post pictures […]
Facebook is working to release its own brand of smartphone. After a $16 billion payday at its IPO, the company has found it needs to justify its paycheck, especially as ad revenues decline.
Access to mobile computing, to allow employees to check email outside of working hours, increases productivity up to a point. After that it just burns people out and makes them unhappy.
I don’t know why this still surprises me (particularly since expressions like the one in the title to this post have been floating around for several hundred years), but whenever […]
A Russian Internet security firm has discovered what is perhaps the world’s most complicated computer virus ever. Given its complexity, a specific country may be behind the attacks.
New facial recognition technology that reads faces for emotional cues could be applied on a mass scale to better understand the general mood of entire populations, even whole nations.
Google’s chairman recently warned a British audience that the Web will remain vulnerable to cyber attacks for the next ten years. Education is essential to maintaining a free and open Internet.