Recently I have posted several entertaining pictures revealing the dangers of assuming that correlation implies causation. A lot of these pictures are housed on this fascinating website. Meanwhile, here’s another one I had to pass along: This can’t be coincidence, right? With all the strange movie choices Nicholas Cage makes, I always knew he was…
In a wonderful article on deep cave exploration, Burkhard Bilger shows how powerful comparison can be in putting an unfamiliar topic into context. He is describing the arduous work involved in deep cave exploration. He is describing the risks of being far, far inside the cave when a heavy rain on the surface begins to…
I came across an interesting quote in the New Yorker recently, reflecting on the US banking system. It reads: The power and the growth of power of our financial oligarchs comes from wielding the savings and credit capital of others. The fetters which bind the people are forged from the people’s own gold. Pretty timely thoughts,…
Oscar Wilde is one of the most quotable people in history of the English language. He even had ideas about robots, many decades before people had any idea what robots could achieve. And in typical Wildean fashion, he provocatively tied it together with his attitudes on the advantages of slavery: “Unless there are slaves to…
Leibniz once described music as an “occult exercise in mathematics performed by a mind unconscious of the fact that it is counting.” As someone currently working through some late Beethoven piano masterpieces, this description makes a lot of sense to me. Now if I can only find enough practice time to make my performances more…
“The mistake is to think that communications will solve the problems of communication, that better wiring will eliminate the ghosts.” —John Durham Peters (Click here to view comments)
Schmidt once said: “In the future, people will spend less time trying to get technology to work … because it will just be seamless. It will just be there. The Web will be everything, and it will also be nothing. It will be like electricity. … If we get this right, I believe we can…
“Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.” – Pamela Hieronymi, professor of philosophy at UCLA
“If it’s a revolution it can’t be predictable. And if it’s predictable it can’t be a revolution.” -Clay Shirky (Click here to view comments)
We Americans are notoriously bad at saving money. While people in Germany, Sweden and even France save about 10% of the money they make, folks in the U.S. save closer to 3 or 4% of their earnings. With so little money saved, Americans face difficulty absorbing economic shocks like recessions and layoffs, and also find…