On Advertising
“Advertising is legalized lying.” – H.G. Wells
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“Advertising is legalized lying.” – H.G. Wells
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Atul Gawande has received appropriate praise for his new book. Read it if you haven’t. Meanwhile, here is one of my favorite paragraphs from the book, to whet your appetites: Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even…
As we watch the newspaper industry die around us, we should reflect on just how important newspapers have been for American democracy. Thomas Jefferson certainly understood this. “The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to…
The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible. (Click here to view comments)
Thanks to science, we are confronted with new discoveries every day. But there are some things that science can’t teach us, and which we need to learn without its help. This point was made marvelously in an essay in the Atlantic monthly by Clancy Martin, who was discussing the increasing number of popular books written by…
A quote from Far From the Tree I thought I’d share: “There is no such thing as reproduction. When two people decide to have a baby, they engage in an act of production, and the widespread use of the word reproduction for this activity, with its implication that two people are but braiding themselves together,…
When people mention Bayes’ Theorem, the cornerstone of much of modern probability thinking, most do not realize that much of the thinking to develop this theorem was done by Pierre-Simon Laplace, a French astronomer and mathematician. As if his work on that theorem was not enough to make him one of my heroes, I recently…