Guest Thinkers — December 21, 2010

The Muhammad bin Nayif Tape

Unfortunately, I don’t have time to blog about this, because I would really like to. Instead, it will have to be a link dump. First there is the audio tape (or at least selections from the phone conversation between Muhammad bin Nayif and Abdullah ‘Asiri.)

Al-Sharq al-Awsat publishes the transcript of the tape along with a fascinating article, I was particularly intrigued by the news of al-Shihri’s wife.

Finally, Asiri’s father who still has another son on the run in Yemen condemns the attack.

Defamiliarization is a common tool in the arts. Here we learn how seeing things from a different angle can lead to billion-dollar success.

In a world without clocks, people used common activities in place of time units. How long it took you to go to the toilet mattered.

In work and life, the rules of success are being redefined.

There are a few theories as to why we’ve never found other intelligent life in our Universe. Physicist Brian Cox walks us through them.

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13 min

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The laws of physics don't prefer matter over antimatter. So how can we be certain that distant stars & galaxies aren't made of antimatter?

Up Next

The piece I wrote for The National on the attempted assassination of Muhammad bin Nayif is now on-line.