For most of human history creativity was something that came from the muses; it was about flashes of insight from another world. Today we know that creativity is something that […]
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I’ve been contemplating the notion of a graduated return to normalcy for about a year. A few days from election, with Obama’s chances having dimmed considerably, would seem to be […]
This week, physicists in Europe are expected to announce whether or not they have found the Higgs boson, which is the last undiscovered particle in the Standard Model of particle physics.
Individuals’ personalities – yours and mine included – are not as stable as we think they are.
What’s the Big Idea? Perhaps the better question is, do humans speak dog? Either way, the debate over whether language is unique to humans, or a faculty also possessed by […]
When I struggle to wrap my head around a problem, I often turn to art to help me literally picture the big issue and, I hope, guide me to an […]
There has been a lot of noise recently surronding the prospects of virtual reality. With Google Glasses being showcased last month at the Google I/O conference, it seems – at the least […]
DID YOU WATCH! Did your heart pound, your palms get sweaty, your muscles tense! Did you join the millions around the world gripped by fear and tension as Felix Baumgartner […]
A gunman opened fire during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises. Most of us, after hearing about this, are probably feeling sickened and disturbed. No doubt preachers of all […]
OK, so I thought I was alone in this, and that it was due to incipient neural disorders or too many drugs back in the 80s, but no: It turns […]
In an illuminating piece, the Washington Post‘s Ezra Klein traces the trajectory of the constitutional argument against the individual mandate from preposterous, fringe position to a real, greatly-feared legal possibility. The concept […]
What’s the big idea? The great incentive for using smartphones and social networks is to always be connected to one another, but it’s starting to look like always is too […]
Warren Littlefield, former NBC president, advises young people entering any field to trust in their instincts even when they run counter to common sense in the industry, then to fight passionately for the projects and ideas they believe in.
If you think of all of the greatest viral campaigns in the world, you’d struggle to think of many from Asia. But that doesn’t mean people aren’t trying, and you […]
Cities live forever, while companies die all the time. As Jonah Lehrer points out in this video, the design ethos of the city is human-centered. The kinds of interactions that happen in cities make us more productive, whereas companies tend to silo knowledge, rely on old ideas, and then die off.
The Matrix is real… and everyone here at NASA for the GSP has taken the red pill. If you recall in the movie, Neo is startled, puzzled, and quite frankly […]
Americans for the past decade seem more caught up than ever in the idea of what it is to be an American, especially in an election year and perhaps never […]
When the Concorde was retired in 2003, our technological ambitions had been checked by practical concerns about noise, cost and fuel consumption. Today, engineers are working on new solutions.
Fashion never sleeps apparently, and nowhere is that more apparent than in Asia where lifestyle related online start-ups are springing up faster than you can say “buy me that Birkin.” […]
Our power was out all weekend, along with that of millions of other electricity refugees. Our city’s patience and civility were fraying. Cannibalism loomed just around the corner, so my […]
The Being Human Conference, which took place at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts this weekend, was designed to explore the science of human experience. The speakers ranged from neuroscientists, […]
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, is turning to individual citizen-scientists to help fine-tune its complex algorithms that search for patterns in noise received from space.
A quiet suburban street set in the leafy suburbs of Cheadle, Manchester, Northern England on Monday, witnessed a coming together of a former Leader of Manchester City Council, Labour MP Graham Stringer […]
David LaChapelle changed the course of his career from commercial photography to fine art because “I want pictures that shine a light on this time we live in” rather than just add to “the distraction and the noise,” he says.
Right after my recent post on “psychopunditry,” I came across signs of this kerfuffle between the writer Jonah Lehrer and the psychologist Christopher Chabris (not to be confused with this […]
As I’ve written before, I’m a skeptical of claims, like Jonathan Gottschall’s, about the power of stories to make us better people. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorkeris skeptical too. […]
The news service for the College of Life Sciences at the University of Wisconsin has a good summary of a recent article at The Scientist by several colleagues who spotlight […]
Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet, says you can’t rely on “the media” or the internet to control your information consumption. Here he suggests a few pieces of software that have helped him to regulate his own information diet.
Near the end of his 2001 book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy?, Henry Kissinger quotes Otto von Bismarck’s observation about the limits of diplomacy: “The best a statesman can […]
Intro This post may be mostly about what’s happening in gaming culture, but it concerns online conduct in general. Some background: online video blogger, Anita Sarkeesian, started a campaign to […]