Gone are the days when crossing a border in Europe almost always meant having to change currencies. Converting guilders into Deutschmark, francs to pesetas, or whatsits into whatnots — all […]
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Portugal’s inferiority complex leads to a very curious comparison
Remarkably, Cuba leads the world (or at least those countries shown on this map) in the patients per doctor ratio.
n n (click on image to enlarge) n The Zeitgeist of the mid ‘fifties probably wasn’t shrinkwrapped in quite so many layers of irony and political correctness as today’s is, […]
n n (click on the image for a larger version) n ‘Everybody Is Against Everybody – Somebody Has To Be For Them’: the message behind this Amnesty International poster is […]
At Time magazine, a focus on who will break out of the pack?!As the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary approaches, it’s all horse race all the time in the […]
Chances are, you don’t know where Manning, South Carolina is. Chances are, you’ve never heard of this small southern town. I only know where it is because it was the […]
1. Asphalt Maine n n Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears […]
Legal scholar Laurence Tribe told Big Think today that he found Elena Kagan’s performance in her Supreme Court confirmation hearings to be “masterful in every respect.” Kagan, who was previously the […]
Opening my daily Treehugger news email just now, I noticed that headline: ‘Dinner in the Dumpster’. Oh, I thought, how fun! An article about freeganism! In fact, the article at […]
In the Matrix trilogy, God is portrayed as a software Architect. The fact that the first movie was released in 1999 is appropriate since software code had begun to exert […]
As advice columnists go, Emiy Yoffe of “Dear Prudence” is usually relatively compassionate. Today, however, Prudie was shockingly cruel to a young woman* grieving the loss of her best friend: […]
In this month’s issue of Nature Biotechnology, I join with other authors to suggest several bold new initiatives in science communication and journalism. The Commentary article includes an overview of […]
This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that Americans are using the Internet to alter the nature […]
America and Greece have lately been running large budget deficits, roughly comparable as a percentage of G.D.P., notes Paul Krugman. Yet markets treat the countries very differently.
I think Elena Kagan will be an outstanding Justice, not just because of her outstanding (and underrated) technical abilities—as I’ll mention shortly, I think the Court as a group is […]
Octopus and hidden cameras go together like chocolate and peanut butter. You never know what those crazy cephalopods will get up to. Today, Boing Boing dug up some neat old […]
This fall in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]
In a recent article in The Australian, Matthew Westwood writes about Canadian social scientist Sarah Thornton, whose book Seven Days in the Art World (cover above) “explores the dynamics of […]
When Bill Frisell was young, he says remembers watching the “Mickey Mouse Club” on his family’s new television. “The leader of the Mouseketeers was this guy named Jimmy and he’d […]
Over the last 20 years, the number of science and technology jobs in America has grown by about 4.2 percent per year—yet the availability of qualified U.S.-born workers in those […]
Previously, I’ve noted the major hole that the IPCC digs itself by releasing its consensus reports on Fridays, only to be lost in the weekend news cycle. Back in February, […]
nn So, there has been a lot of talk about “volcano monitoring” over the last 24 hours, now hasn’t there? nn Now, I’m not going to revisit this discussion, but […]
In November 2009, nine researchers from MIT’s prestigious Media Lab were among the eleven authors of a paper* that espoused the value of programming as an essential skill for all. […]
“I think I’m beginning to know something about painting,” Pierre-Auguste Renoir said on the day he died as he turned away from a still life he’d been working on and […]
On Thursday, Republicans blocked an attempt to lift the liability cap for oil companies for the fourth time. Although BP has agreed to establish a $20 billion fund to pay […]
Michael Moore is in a class by himself when it comes to generating news attention, advance publicity, and box office for his documentary films. For example, when I was in […]
This semester in the sophomore-level course I teach on “Communication and Society,” we spent several weeks examining the many ways that individuals and groups are using the internet to alter […]
Do you have sex like a Finn or a Bangladeshi? Researchers have surveyed “sociosexuality”—the scientific euphemism for promiscuity—in 48 countries. Where do you rank?
Consider the following events, their political timing, and their impact on the framing of the stem cell debate: 1) Last week, as the House was preparing to vote on legislation […]