“Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate,” Dante Alighieri wrote on the entrance to Hell in the Inferno section of his allegorical masterpiece The Divine Comedy. The English translation usually goes something […]
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Because education is largely a government function, there seems to be littlenhope of ever disentangling politics and education. n Today I’ll wear black tonschool. I’ve worn black to school almost […]
Waq al-waq’s spring cleaning goes on, as we continue to ignore stories in nearly every sector. But I think it is time for a quick round-up.First is this story about […]
I just had a chance to view the upcoming Nintendo 3DS portable gaming console operating with autostereoscopic technology, which is 3D without the glasses. This is truly the beginning of a […]
It is that time a year again – final exams, Christmas music and the annual American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. All this does make the end of the […]
Long gone are the days when Clapham was a small, rustic village well beyond the gates of medieval London. Also gone, but less long, is the era of Clapham as […]
A website will analyze your emails and chats and estimate how well you are in sync with your partner, frenemy or whoever.
It’s plain to see that I’m an optimist, sometimes more than is socially comfortable. The ease with which I dismiss the disastrous economic decline above serves as one example of that. I wrote that the recession will benefit our political system, and, before I cut this line, as having “rewarded our company for methodical execution and ruthless efficiency by removing competitors from the landscape.” I make no mention of the disastrous effects on millions of people, and the great uncertainty that grips any well-briefed mind, because it truly doesn’t stand in the foreground of my mind (despite suffering personal loss of wealth).
Our species is running towards a precipice with looming dangers like economic decline, political unrest, climate crisis, and more threatening to grip us as we jump off the edge, but my optimism is stronger now than ever before. On the other side of that looming gap are extraordinary breakthroughs in healthcare, communications technology, access to space, human productivity, artistic creation and literally hundreds of fields. With the right execution and a little bit of luck we’ll all live to see these breakthroughs — and members of my generation will live to see dramatically lengthened life-spans, exploration and colonization of space, and more opportunity than ever to work for passion instead of simply working for pay.
Instead of taking this space to regale you with the many personal and focused changes I intend to make in 2009, let me rather encourage you to spend time this year thinking, as I’m going to, more about what we can do in 2009 to positively affect the future our culture will face in 2020, 2050, 3000 and beyond.
If we want to keep our strong military and provide health care for the elderly, we’re going to have to make sacrifices. It’s the responsible, patriotic thing to do.
“I’ll be your mirror,” The Velvet Underground sang in the song of the same name, “Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know.” In The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael […]
In the final guest post on Colorado’s defeated Amendment 62, a “personhood” initiative that would have given full legal rights to fertilized human eggs, Trina Stout examines the effect of […]
Did volcanoes that erupt kill all the Permian dinosaurs? FOX News thinks they did! And in real news, the Turrialba eruption may not lead much. UPDATE: and now we have a field report of the Turrialba event.
“I tend to think of the exhibitions I do as a loose accumulation of paintings with no single theme—like a variety show,” artist Glenn Brown said in 2007. “A comedy […]
Is McCain’s “House” Gaffe Similar to George Bush’s 1992 “Scanner” Moment?In his first major negative ad of the campaign, Obama is defining McCain as out of touch with Americans’ economic […]
Piggybacking on last week’s Bill Moyers segment on radical right media and hate speech, Media Matters for America issued the following action advisory last night: Michael Savage is at it […]
“The main argument here is that pleasure is deep,” Paul Bloom writes early on in his new book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We […]
Almost 200 years later, you still have to just be awestruck by the magnitude of the “Great Eruption” of Tambora that produced the “Years without a Summer”.
Next week, I will be teaming up with Chris Mooney at Cal Tech for an evening lecture followed by a day long science communication seminar for the university’s graduate students […]
There have been countless fictional portrayals of fake American presidents in pop culture. From the alien-battling President Thomas Whitmore in “Independence Day” to hopeless romantic President Andrew Shepherd in “the […]
If I want you to give time or money to my cause, I’ll say your sacrifice is for “people just like you, just like me,” for “communities like yours, all […]
The last of Etna Week here on Eruptions has guest blogger Boris Behncke talking about the volcanic hazards posed by Mt. Etna.
The amount of money hedge funds make is only surpassed by the amount of secrecy surrounding how they make it. To pull back the curtain on these financial wizards, Big […]
“My work is just trying to make sense of the disorienting and overloaded world that we inhabit,” says DJ Spooky. “We’re bombarded with sound at every level.” In his Big […]
I used to have a joke I told all the time, back when the mortgage business was booming, about the “loan officer’s tool kit.” If I saw someone standing in […]
The Web and cloud computing have made the work of archivists and record keepers faster than ever before, but is information lost in the internet’s labyrinth any more accessible than […]
Many people were left gasping when President Obama unveiled his new plan for outer space, including his proposal to cancel NASA’s Constellation program. It turns out that the great recession […]
Back in February, I traveled to Rome, Italy to present at a conference sponsored by Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation. The focus was on climate change […]
“Would you please turn the lights up,” Robert F Kennedy Jr. asked the stage crew as he took the floor of New York’s Town Hall in Times Square, about to […]
As a philosopher, I always wonder why the democratic system can yield this kind of incompetent, ignorant, over-ambitious, but always feel good presidents. In US, we got George W. Bush (sorry, Senior President Bush, Yes! Your eldest son!), In Taiwan they got two!
God bless human being!