Stop and look at the tangled rootlets of the poison ivy vine climbing the locust tree. Notice the way they twist around each other like plaits in a golden braid, like tendrils of seaweed washed to shore. Stop and look, but do not touch. Never, never touch, not even in winter. Stop and ponder the […]
What if I told you that free will is an illusion but that instead of a vast, mysterious universe out there controlling our fates, there is actually a vast, mysterious universe within us that we are on the verge of being able to comprehend? By the end of this book, I hope to convince you […]
My name is Philip J. Corso, and for two incredible years back in the 1960s while I was a lieutenant colonel in the army heading up the Foreign Technology desk in Army Research and Development at the Pentagon, I led a double life. In my routine everyday job as a researcher and evaluator of weapons […]
The Science.” We’re all supposed to know what “The Science” says. “The Science,” we’re told, is settled. How many times have you heard it? Humans have already broken the earth’s climate. Temperatures are rising, sea level is surging, ice is disappearing, and heat waves, storms, droughts, floods, and wildfires are an ever-worsening scourge on the […]
Software is essential today. It’s hard to think of any industry where software isn’t changing practically everything about how work is done. Manufacturing needs software to monitor production and shipping, let alone the robots that increasingly perform the actual task. Advertising, politics, and fitness, among others, are awash in big data and they routinely use […]
In September 2022, a wave of normal people robbed banks in Lebanon. What made these events more newsworthy than typical bank robberies was that most of these people were only robbing the banks to get their own money back. Due to a financial crisis in Lebanon, banks were not letting people access their own cash […]
Many students in the behavioral sciences view the required statistics course as an intimidating obstacle that has been placed in the middle of an otherwise interesting curriculum. They want to learn about psychology and human behavior—not about math and science. As a result, the statistics course is seen as irrelevant to their education and career […]
There is a popular misconception that science is an impersonal, dispassionate, and thoroughly objective enterprise. Whereas most other human activities are dominated by fashions, fads, and personalities, science is supposed to be constrained by agreed rules of procedure and rigorous tests. It is the results that count, not the people who produce them. This is, […]
In April, millions of tiny flowers spread over the blackjack hills and vast prairies in the Osage territory of Oklahoma. There are Johnny-jump-ups and spring beauties and little bluets. The Osage writer John Joseph Mathews observed that the galaxy of petals makes it look as if the “gods had left confetti.” In May, when coyotes […]
Let us follow the railroad tracks out on the plain where there is level land in all directions as far as we can see. All around us we can see the sky meeting the distant plain in a long even line. This is called the horizon. The ideal example of the horizon is seen when […]
Every Wednesday afternoon in the laboratory where I used to work, we had an event called journal club. The word ‘club’ makes it sound more fun than it was. The ritual, practised in labs around the world, worked like this: one member of the lab would present a recent publication from the scientific literature that […]
t starts with the little things: an extra toothbrush in the glass holder next to the sink, a few articles of clothing in the smallest drawer, phone chargers on both sides of the bed. Then the little things turn to slightly bigger things: razors and mouthwash and birth control pills all fighting for space in […]