The Stupidity of Dignity
New Republic - Romantics and Greens tend to idealize the natural and demonize technology. Traditionalists and conservatives by temperament distrust radical change. Egalitarians worry about an arms race in enhancement techniques. And anyone is likely to have a “yuck” response when contemplating unprecedented manipulations of our biology.
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Where Are They?
Technology Review, by Nick Bostrom - I hope that our Mars probes discover nothing. It would be good news if we find Mars to be sterile. Dead rocks and lifeless sands would lift my spirit.
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Does technology drive history?
New Yorker, by Jill Lepore - Thomas Edison didn’t wash, and was convinced that changing his clothes would alter his body’s chemistry, and not in a good way. Nikola Tesla, who developed the first motor for alternating current, had to do everything in multiples of three: twenty-seven laps in the pool, twelve hundred electric lamps for the city of Strasbourg.
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The Bohr paradox
physicsworld.com, by Robert P Crease - In history books, Bohr’s chief contribution to physics is usually said to be “the Bohr atom” — his application in 1912–3 of the still-recent quantum hypothesis to overcome instabilities in Rutherford’s “solar-system” model of the atom, in which electrons travelled in fixed orbits around a positively charged nucleus. But this brilliant intuitive leap, in which Bohr assembled several puzzling features from insufficient data, was soon superseded by more sophisticated models.
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Timeline of the universe
Guardian - Using observatories on the earth and in space, astronomers have been able to study the nature of the cosmos in unprecedented detail. By analysing the motion of distant galaxies, they have discovered that the whole cosmos is expanding under the influence of forces unleashed at its birth in the big bang. Combined with studies of the radiation left over from that primordial explosion, they have found that the universe was born 13.7bn years ago, give or take 200m years.
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Human evolution - Before the exodus
Economist - For two-thirds of its history, Homo sapiens lived exclusively in Africa. Only now are the details of that period becoming clear
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Richard Dawkins and His Selfish Meme
NY Sun, by Pat Shipman - Once forced to live together rather than founding new colonies, species preadapted to cooperation successfully adopt eusociality precisely because it is evolutionarily advantageous.
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Where Lab Meets Atelier
Newsweek - Pablo Picasso and the Cubists were fascinated by Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Georges Braque’s deconstructed still-lifes were inspired by the idea of a fourth dimension, and Claude Monet’s sophisticated use of color suggests that he was—at least subconsciously—a very shrewd chemist.
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