Guest Thinkers — March 29, 2011

Missing Bronx Zoo Cobra Is Tweeting

@BronxZoosCobra has 12,165 twitter followers as of this writing.

We live in the digital age, communicating instantaneously across continents, but we’re still just a bunch of primates chattering about where the hell that snake is.

Hooray for traditional values!

[Photo credit: teachingsagittarian, Creative Commons.]

Strange Maps

In 1882, a man wrongly drew a map. His mistake saved a forest of 300-year-old trees.

A 19th-century surveying mistake kept lumberjacks away from what is now Minnesota’s largest patch of old-growth trees.

Thinking

What is Mahāyāna Buddhism? A scholar of Buddhism explains

Mahāyāna is the most popular type of Buddhism in the world today.

Debate world champion explains how to argue

Bo Seo, Harvard’s former debate coach, explains a good argument.

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5 min

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with

Bo Seo

Thinking

Not believing is the second biggest “belief” in the U.S.

There are different types of atheism and atheists. In general, they can be classified as the non-religious, the non-believers, and agnostics.

Thinking

Lobsters don’t die from old age — they die from exhaustion

Being mortal makes life so much sweeter.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

Color Commentary: The End of the Friend

If it lives up to its initial promise, the much-ballyhooed new app Color represents a fundamentally new type of mobile social network that, in many ways, is almost the polar opposite of Facebook. What’s so radical about it? For one, Color has done away entirely with the notion of the Friend.