Monday, May 31, 2010

Can bacteria make you smarter?

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It is hard enough in the social sciences to disentangle cause and effect as it is. Now this - Can bacteria make you smarter?
Sunday, May 30, 2010

The copycat's whiskers

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From the May 1, 2010 edition of the Spectator. Bevis Hillier reviews Nicolas Barker's Horace Walpole's Description of the Villa at ...

General Systems Thinking

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I read Gerald Weinberg's An Introduction to General Systems Thinking years ago in college. It was not an assigned book for a course but...
Saturday, May 29, 2010

We tend to substitute opinions for thinking

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Is Thinking Back in Fashion , Lane Wallace, The Atlantic June 2009. See our earlier Pigeon Post article on Imagination in children's st...
Friday, May 28, 2010

Reading is productive

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An interesting diagram from Introduction to Social Macrodynamics, Compact Macromodels of the World System Growth by Andrey Korotayev, Artemy...

A man writing such history is driving more horses abreast in his team

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Hilaire Belloc, On the Decline of the Book . The lament for the decline of reading, the decline of the book is of course ageless. It is an...

So with locusts, so with humans?

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Productivity is the source of human well-being and it took a marked leap upwards back around 10,000 years ago when people settled down, chan...
Thursday, May 27, 2010

The Golden Verses of Pythagoras

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I am always intrigued by cultural continuity, the capacity for ideas or memes to continue on down the generations through stories, songs, an...

High population density triggers cultural explosions

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An interesting article over at e! Science News, High population density triggers cultural explosions from June 4th, 2009. High population ...
Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Turning Fifty - To Kill a Mockingbird

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The New York Times has an article ( A Classic Turns 50, and Parties are Planned ) outlining the celebrations planned for this year to mark t...