Megan , who’s started a dialogue with Ellen Ruppel Shell (author of the new book Cheap ), has some ruminations on the infamous maker of shelves with short shelf lives. Lots to digest, including some deee-lightful ancedotes from the bad old days of furniture so durable you seemed to be stuck . . . . Continue Reading »
Noted Neuro-Buddhist Sam Harris has this to say about the President’s choice to head the NIH: Dr. Collins has written that “science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence” and that “the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly . . . . Continue Reading »
Thanks to Alan Jacobs , I have read the latest excerpt from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs . “I will restore your sense of childlike wonder,” he vows. “There is nothing you can do to stop me.” Hold that thought. The excerpt in question reads thus: Did you know that now, . . . . Continue Reading »
“Any two AI designs might be less similar to one another than you are to a petunia.” - Eliezer Yudkowsky, Artificial Intelligence as a Positive and Negative Factor in Global Risk . John Schwenkler was kind enough to point me towards this post by Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution in . . . . Continue Reading »
According to Tom Wolfe , our space program needs a philosophic justification to get the “godlike” adventure that gave us all that right stuff going again. Here are a few random thoughts in that direction. I’m not saying I agree with them or that I’m volunteering to be a . . . . Continue Reading »
One thing is certain: the image of America and postmodernism are inextricably bound up with each other. Nay, I will go a step further and say — get ready — that they are “coeval.” (Coeval is a rare term used by a certain philosopher and his acolytes.) How so? Postmodernism in . . . . Continue Reading »
The only only problem is: according to this data, the correlation is inverse. The more pornography, the less rape. “...since the mainstreaming of porn into American lives in the early 70s, ...the incidence of rape per capita has declined by an astonishing 85%.” The data apparently ties . . . . Continue Reading »
This morning, I sat next to an autistic man on the metro. We chatted a bit, and then he grabbed a scrap of paper and scrawled on it: “JOBFAIR=1979” “GAO=2009” He then concatenated the numbers, and wrote: 19792009 His pen lingered above the piece of paper for thirty seconds or . . . . Continue Reading »
While we’re on the subject of form, I recently stumbled upon University of Texas mathematics professor Nikos Salingaros’ phenomenal work Anti-Architecture and Deconstruction , a short excerpt of which is posted on his faculty page: In wanting to explain a cultural mystery — why . . . . Continue Reading »
I was surprised and delighted this week to discover two essays bemoaning the state of mathematics education and, in particular, high-school geometry. I had always imagined that my pet obsession with the interactions between mathematics and culture was just that, but apparently the movement contains . . . . Continue Reading »
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