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There never was a golden age of freedom
Matt Ridley
Life was more free in the past only for the elite — if at all I will have a lot to say in The Rational Optimist about golden-age nostalgia. It’s an easy trap, to think that the past was better or more free than the present. It’s not hard to show that the past was poorer […]
Matt Ridley
The new 1.9m year old hominin fossils from South Africa Carl Zimmer puts the new mother-and-son fossils in their place In other words, the fossils Berger discovered cannot be our direct ancestors. Instead, they may be very informative cousins. If Berger’s right, then the evolution of Homo happened in a surprisingly piecemeal way. Our legs […]
Matt Ridley
You can have order in a flock of birds or a society without having a dictator The thing about tightly coordinated flocks of birds is that they can’t work by top-down planning and they can’t be anarchic free-for-alls either. Now comes news that they are in between: there is no single leader but some birds […]
The more we know, the more we don’t know
Matt Ridley
Science is the exploration of ignorance Science is not the cataloguing of facts or the accumulation of knowledge. It is the production of ignorance. Scientists are in the business of finding new seams of mystery. As Jennifer Doudna at U C Berkeley puts it in Erika Check Hayden’s Nature article about the tenth anniversary of the first draft of the human […]
Matt Ridley
Who’s Galileo and who’s the pope today? Unintentionally hilarious juxtaposition of remarks in an article by the climate scientist James Hansen: This is not the 17th century, when “beliefs” trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system and Religions across the spectrum — Catholics, Jews, Mainline Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Evangelicals — […]
Matt Ridley
Richer and nicer in the future? David Brooks on why America’s future is bright: In sum, the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism […]
Matt Ridley
Great new fossil, but the missing link it aint Big news? The Telegraph: Missing link between man and apes found. The Sunday Times: Fossil from cave is a ‘missing link’ The cliche is misleading. The new fossil is a very complete and therefore very interesting specimen from a poorly understood period. If it proves to have features of both Australopithecus […]
All because a Pisan merchant went to North Africa in the late 1100s.
Matt Ridley
For those who think truth is the most beautiful thing of all, enjoy this gorgeous short film by Cristobal Vila about the mathematics of biological shapes.
Being a customer of your customers
Matt Ridley
How fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916 From Maggie Koerth Baker at boingboing.net, a fascinating glimpse of how fresh and wondrous electricity seemed to Americans in 1916. Pity she spoils it by an attempt at finding the cloud in the silver lining at the end. Centralized electricity changed energy production from a […]
Matt Ridley
Exaggerations run rife while the reality is strangely absent from recent reporting on melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Breathless reporting last week of a new estimate of Greenland’s melting ice. It’s higher than it was before: “The changes on the Greenland ice sheet are happening fast, and we are definitely losing more ice mass […]
