Debating Time
Julian Barbour and Tim Maudlin argue their opposite positions at the Foundational Questions Institute’s setting Time Aright conference.
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David Gelernter: Seer of the Mirror World
David Gelernter, a pioneering computer scientist, foresaw the modern internet but thinks computers are still too hard to use
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How to Dispel Your Illusions
Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux).
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The Power of Nothing
Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine?
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No Death, No Taxes
The libertarian futurism of Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel.
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New York’s Maker Faire: More Than Just Digital Quilting
Technology and society: The “maker” movement could change how science is taught and boost innovation. It may even herald a new industrial revolution
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Seasteading: Cities on the Ocean
Seasteading: Libertarians dream of creating self-ruling floating cities. But can the many obstacles, not least the engineering ones, be overcome?
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The Evolved Self-Management System
If placebo medicine can induce people to release hidden healing resources, are there other ways in which the cultural environment can “give permission” to people to come out of their shells and to do things they wouldn’t have done in the past? Can cultural signals encourage people to reveal sides of their personality or faculties…
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Astronomers Find Biggest Black Holes Yet
Astronomers are reporting that they have taken the measure of the biggest, baddest black holes yet found in the universe, abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our solar system into which billions of Suns have vanished like a guilty thought. Such holes, they say, might be the gravitational cornerstones of galaxies and clues to…
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The Politics of Famine
A common misconception is that hunger crises are about a lack of food. In Northern Kenya, where an estimated half a million Kenyan children and pregnant or breast-feeding women suffer acute malnutrition, there is food but the real issue is poverty. In April the World Bank reported that 44 million people worldwide were pushed over…