Michael Pollan suggests we’ll need a cultural framework to guide our nation’s relationship with drugs now that “just say no” is no longer our guiding principle. He points to the many indigenous cultures that have used ritual to keep useful […]
So many reasons. “Not only are these projects inordinately expensive, states and localities are not even attempting to build particularly ambitious projects. The US is the sixth-most expensive country in the world to build rapid-rail transit infrastructure…” | learn more
“After digging around a bit, I was fascinated to learn that independent researchers were fairly common in the 18th and 19th centuries… These days, if you say you work in research, most people assume you work in academia.” | learn more
What happened when Andrew Carnegie funded ~1700 free libraries? “Sometimes obvious ideas work. If you want to encourage more innovation, give people better access to knowledge.” | learn more
Inside this post Balaji describes a concept of read-only culture: “the ability to repeat what an ancestor has handed down – but not recreate it from first principles.” It reminds me of cargo cults a bit. | learn more
There’s a unique problem that comes with a formal peer-review publication process. “We’re going to kill ourselves because of stupidity.” | learn more
“We’re going to be able to piece together what the universe’s story was in the first billion years after the Big Bang,” says Caitlin Casey, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, who co-leads a team that received […]
A reasoned intellectual analysis into the hardest-to-dismiss cases of UFOs by Robin Hanson of Overcoming Bias. | learn more
Short answer: yes. “Rogue, like most recycling companies, had been sending plastic trash to China, but when China shut its doors two years ago, Leebrick scoured the U.S. for buyers. She could find only someone who wanted white milk jugs. […]
I just finished reading a book about the early days of SpaceX. The number of times the company came close to death is remarkable. “SpaceX beats out Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics to be the sole provider […]