bigthink.com

This journey goes across 13 countries, and is 11,654 miles or 18,755 kilometres and takes 14 days assuming no connections are missed.

He cites Ayn Rand. That’s the end of all credibility.

…Earlier this century, some very strong evidence arrived showing that there was a Universe before the Big Bang, demonstrating that the Big Bang wasn’t truly the start of it all…

NASA chief to defy agency's charter, terminating science

One of the best analogies I ever heard concerning the question of life in the Universe is that of a lottery. Each world that forms around each star — whether it’s a planet, moon, or dwarf planet — is like a lottery ticket. All of a sudden, a huge number of questions arise.

Ominous strings of Austrian composer Joseph Haydn’s “Oxford” Symphony (No. 92) announce the beginning and end of each episode of Revolutions. The podcast, hosted by author Mike Duncan, walks listeners through history’s most significant turning points, from the French Revolution to the Bolshevik insurrection. Its new season shakes up the formula. This time, Duncan isn’t talking about a terrestrial dustup. He’s chronicling the Martian Revolution.

Article from July 2010

A better guide to well-being and human progress is whether people can achieve their goals and fulfill their values.12 The good life is one of constantly discovering, pursuing, achieving, and maintaining values.

Here in our Universe, both normal and dark matter can be measured astrophysically. But only normal matter can collapse. Why is that?

When we abandon the scientific process and choose whatever conclusion best suits our whims, preferences, or proclivities, the underlying scientific reality doesn’t stop being true. We simply suffer the consequences that come along with choosing a less-than-optimal path for dealing with the very real problems that we’re facing.

Blindsight is a unique kind of first-contact novel. Its focus is not on humanity’s first meeting with an alien civilization, but rather that this civilization is highly intelligent, yet lacks consciousness.

CW: images from fur farms

Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness.

There are at least two versions of the story of Pandora’s box. In the classic version from the Greek poet Hesiod, when Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, she unleashed into the world all sorts of evils: sickness, famine, death, and people who ask questions at the end of a meeting. When Pandora finally closed the jar, she left only one “evil” inside: hope. For Hesiod, there’s nothing so cruel as hope. Hope is what forces us to carry on building, fixing, and loving when the world offers only destruction, chaos, and heartbreak. It’s what gets us off the ground only to be punched back down. Hope is the naivety of a fool. As Friedrich Nietzsche put it, “Hope, in reality, is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.”

There is a lot of stuff in Middle-Earth — exquisite gems, magic rings, fabled swords, and ancestral talismans — as well as the more general matter of clothes and armor, megaliths and monuments, food and drink. A supernatural aura suffuses many of these things: stones (standing stones, Seeing Stones, ruins), trees (waking, walking, warring), and paths (traces and memories of ancient footsteps, sentient and animate, seeming to plot). Some things are more mundane (rations, gear), others immense, international enterprises — such as the outbreak of total war and the mass mobilization of armed forces across Middle-Earth, activating communities in different ways.