I just read The Economist’s book review of Dominic Johnson‘s God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. The review suggests “Belief in divine punishment may be inherent and a useful evolutionary adaptation, helping humans overcome selfishness.” But correctly assessing causation…
Category: Science and Technology
Brain-Machine Interface (BMI): Something to Think About
The Cluetrain Listicle: New Clues
This is good: The Cluetrain Listicle. Very good. It’s true. The Cluetrain Listicle sets out a sequence of 121 new ideas–clues–about the Web. And about us. And how the two are related. The new clues remind us of the incredible, world changing power of…
Response to 22 Creationists
Last Tuesday, Bill Nye (the science guy) debated Ken Ham (founder and CEO of Kentucky’s Creation Museum) on the question of whether a young-earth creation model is compatible with the theory of evolution. NPR posted a nice summary of the debate,…
Goodbye Google Reader; Hello RSS (again)
On July 1, Google Reader performed a final Mark All As Read for every user. And then went dark. Google Reader launched in 2005 and I started using it almost immediately. The year before, I was already convinced of the…
Minneapolis Does Airport Wi-Fi Right!
If you do much travelling, you know how helpful it is to have reasonable wireless internet access (wi-fi) in the terminal; but not all airport wi-fi is created equal. I just returned from a trip that included a brief layover…
The Global Warming Consensus Gap
The media tends to present every story as having two sides. It makes for good TV—or radio, press, blogs, etc.—to present arguments from “both sides” of the issue. It creates ready-made conflict and absolves the host journalists from actually following…
Welcome to the World Wide Web
It was twenty years ago today Tim Berners-Lee taught the world to play (online)… Technically, it was April 30, 1993 when CERN released the World Wide Web into the public domain. And to commemorate the anniversary, they have resurrected the…