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Despite knuckle-gripping tension and mass nuclear proliferation during the Cold War, not a single detonation has caused mass civilian casualties since 1945. According to investigative journalist Eric Schlosser, such good fortune is nothing more than blind luck.

Architect Frank Gehry’s raised many controversial buildings over the years, but few as controversial as the middle finger he recently raised during a press conference in Spain. During a press […]

Life is full of next steps. In the academic literature, these things would be called “second order effects”. But, in real life, they’re called consequences (or unintended consequences). Each of […]

You’ve probably never heard of Ahwaz. But the Emirate in waiting already has a flag – and, of course, a map…

My good friend and college professor Dr. M. Ritchey wrote a manifesto for a new project of mine. She has turned my insistence on bothering everyone about what objective qualities […]

It’s easy to be disenchanted with the current state of technology. Some people bemoan the broken promises of the Jetsons and ask where the flying cars are. Others point out […]

Wyoming and Colorado are not the only cartographic twins

No, this is not an illustrated guide to basket weaving. This is indeed a map. Or to be precise, a cartogram: statistical data presented in a geographic context. Even if […]

Home may be where the heart is, but a new study suggests it’s also where the stress is for a modern workforce facing more responsibilities than ever.

Last weekend, I sat down with a billion other people from across the globe to watch Germany battle Argentina for the World Cup final. In actuality, I was sitting in […]

Fans of Dan Brown (and Tom Hanks) hoped to get an education in the Italian Renaissance along with their beach reading (and movie-going) of The Da Vinci Code. But they’re missing out on a Renaissance master of art and mathematics just as captivating and mysterious as Da Vinci—Piero della Francesca.

There have been a lot of stories out there recently about the pros and cons of working at Google — not from a purely professional perspective, but from a personal […]

How the demons and angels of our greatest minds advanced science. Image credit: Luis Royo Fantasy Art, via Photobucket user mikenolan78. When most people think of Einstein, they think of […]

Yesterday, NASA released this image, Arp 81: 100 Million Years Later, shot by Hubble. From NASA: From planet Earth, we see this strongly distorted pair of galaxies, cataloged as Arp […]

NEW YORK – Karl Marx famously wrote that history repeats itself, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Yet when we look around nowadays, we can’t help […]

Currently, passwords are total chaos. In fact, most people have terrible passwords that are easy for hackers to guess. Even worse, many people use the same password for all their […]

Human beings are naturally wired to contribute. Teamwork ensures survival for the group as well as the individual: the useful and collaborative are always welcomed in the tribe. But we’re […]

It would be hard to simplify capitalism further than Monopoly. The game attempts to express the ruthlessness of raw capitalism by declaring that whoever has the most money at the […]

“Oh! what a tangled web we weave,” Sir Walter Scott wrote in his 1808 epic poem Marmion, “When first we practice to deceive!” But what a pretty web it might […]

Nobody goes to a baseball game to watch the umpires, so why would someone go to a museum to see an exhibition dedicated to an art critic—one of those arbiters […]

“The broken places are my canvases,” Artist Lily Yeh says in the documentary The Barefoot Artist. “People’s stories are my pigments. People’s talents and imaginations are the instruments. I began […]

Violence broke out in the streets of Kyiv, Ukraine today between pro-democracy protesters and riot police. At least nine people have been killed and hundreds more seriously injured, including journalists […]

Complexity theory is about adaptive systems that teeter on the edge of chaos.

While a History course, for and of the ages, this “class” is ultimately the Cosmology of modern day Science. It encompasses the entirety of academia in one sweeping story of physics, astronomy, geology, biology, ecology, sociology, technology and beyond.

I came to the full realization that there is no formula for life. And a perfect job, a house, a business or a spouse is an illusion of our mind trying to bring order to a life that has none.

After wars end and soldiers come home, it usually takes a while for the war to “come home” to the consciousness of the American people at large. When did the […]

Here is the big idea, according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-being Index Thanksgiving is one of the least stressful and happiest days of the year. Beyond good food – what about […]

What one can do is absorb and act on the insight that events which we’ve been taught are abnormal are in fact normal and that normal collapses, normal breakdowns, normal crises occur within most human lives. 

The man who coined the country’s name was expelled from it, and died in exile

The Joseon Dynasty ruled over Korea for more than half a millennium, stretching from 1392, when horses were still the main means of travel, to 1910, the dawn of the […]