Homunculi

A truly astounding series of German condom advertisements are making the rounds this morning—each features a sketch of a sperm made to look like Adolf Hitler, Osama Bin Laden or Mao Zedong. Their not so subtle message being, “Better wrap it up… unless you want to bring evil into the world!”
On one hand, these ads [...]

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Bringing Order to Chaos

About a year ago when I read Richard Dawkin’s explication of Darwin in The Blind Watchmaker, I was stuck by how analogous the basic mechanisms of natural evolution and economics were. Now I can be sure it was no coincidence:
Ideas evolve by descent with modification, just as bodies do, and Darwin at least partly got [...]

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A Negative Relationship

As identified by The Economist:
[A]cross the world, the less students know about science, the more optimistic they are about the chances of solving the planet’s environmental problems.
This is, of course, a key explanation behind Americans’ bubbling idealism.

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Best Sentence(s) I Read Today

‘The forecaster is like an entrepreneur,’ says Roman Frydman. ‘He uses quantitative methods, but he also studies history, and relies on intuition and judgment. He is not a scientist.’
The quote refers specifically to economics forecasters, but it applies just as well to any forecaster of complex systems, such as those who forecast climate changes.
Predictions are [...]

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How Cultural Climes Can Influence Neurosurgery

Stumbled upon this article and found it an interesting and informative study of German culture. The following sentence is particularly delightful:
Cutting open any human head to appreciate and learn its anatomy is a unique opportunity for reflection on our humanity…[h]owever, this opportunity, especially for a Jewish surgeon, takes on a different cast when surrounded by [...]

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