A tribe that has no words for numbers?

That doesn't mean they don't have words for quantities, but not for specific numbers. 

How free are we? How conditioned are we? Do we know? Can we know?

All of these questions need to be considered carefully by anyone wishing to lay claim to the label of "liberal". In addition to these questions, one must consider the role of personal responsibility in all of this - what does it actually mean to be free, in terms of what is expected ( Read more... )

I just found a blog at www.ribbonfarm.com that is well worth reading.

Here is a sample introspective post, here is something else entirely.

I highly recommend Robert Todd Carroll's Skeptic's Dictionary (www.skepdic.com). It includes several articles on various pseudoscientific and paranormal "phenomena" and similar, providing arguments to refute various claims made related to these topics. There is also a book, by the same author, that emerged from the website.

Could logic be over-rated? Could we live in a paradox? Could we, in fact, be a paradox ourselves? Could even fuzzy logic be too much of an over-simplification to give us an accurate picture of the universe? What is not random, yet not determined as well? Could it be us and the universe around us?

What does "meaning" mean? What does "thinking" mean?  ( Read more... )

I don't know the past and I cannot go back to the past. I don't know the future, yet I always live the future, the future of the past, a.k.a. the present. The present is a fleeting concept that cannot be fully captured in a truly meaningful way. Is there such a thing as a "moment", or is that something humans perceive so that they can come to terms ( Read more... )

Thinking is hard. It's also tiring. Trying to understand the wonders of the universe, from how people go about their daily lives to how particles operate at the sub-atomic level, requires a lot of study, and you still won't get it right. There will always be a lot of ignorance left, because, fundamentally, you will never know for sure if you got ( Read more... )

Click to view

Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, a little bit of John Cleese, explosions, a standard plot, and a lot of teenagers making noise in the movie theatre.

Not very interesting, to be honest.

The insanity of terrorism, the insanity that goes into fighting terrorism, the fear and pain that terrorism causes. The explosions, the killings, the secret wars that no one knows about except those that do. Body of Lies is a movie by Ridley Scott, featuring Leonardo diCaprio, Mark Strong, Russell Crowe and Golshifteh Farahani.

While not amazing, ( Read more... )

The pound keeps falling. Bill Emmott predicts the Eurozone will collapse, because having an independent central bank means you can't simply have your currency devalue and soften blows. One really would have thought that solving underlying conditions like short-termist, excessive risk-taking in the financial sector would be considered bigger ( Read more... )