wachter

The democratic ideal of rule by the people is coming full circle. The direct democracy of 5th century BC Athens--the world's first--was an anomaly that nonetheless had a seminal effect on geopolitical

I really think the soon-to-be-realized Sensay.it conversational network is the killer app for messaging. Why? Because the intelligence and interactivity being built into Sensay is far superior and personal

What if you had a cross-platform utility giving you the power to choose an expert or even a confidant from among millions of knowledgeable people across virtually all of the 3 billion people on social

Our moral concepts are sometimes pushed away from completeness by virtue of the fact that most of the events in our personal lives tend to support the theory that there's a balance between good and evil

What is the key feature of human learning? It is, I believe, the desire to learn. From a very young age, children are instinctively motivated to learn. Also, desire is often motivated by a payoff. My view

One of the most significant concepts to emerge from Jungian psychology--at least as useful as "introvert" and "extrovert"--is that of the "shadow." An individual's shadow

First, I leaped from rock to rock, counting them as I went. Then, I picked up a rock and smashed it against another to make it sharp. My ax helped me prepare my barbecue. All my family and friends love

Animals can do what we do. They can use sign language, tools and their society is eerily similar to our own. But they are not conscious. They are not trying to solve David Chalmers' "hard problem;"

In humanity's first democracy, that of Athens in the fifth century BC, the role of the media fell to the playwrights. Aristophanes was the Greeks' Woodward and Bernstein. In his "Lysistrata"

Left to his own devices, man will take available facts and mythologize them into a belief system. Science is such a belief system, even though it has a rigorous basis in fact. These functions, mythologizing

One contribution of quantum science is we've found there are limits to the division of matter/energy and spacetime. But we've also found our ability to work with and even transform these base units is

We are all used to seeing changes of state. When the state of a system changes; say, with an animal having offspring, there is no change in the system, only in the state of the system. But when that offspring

Before the discovery of evolution there were some strange theories about heredity. Few were as weird as perhaps the most prevalent, the theory of the homunculus. This is the idea that a fully articulated

Man created God to help him process the unknown. We now have tools other than religion for this purpose; personal relationships are more information-rich, and science is providing more answers than ever

We have to learn to see the distortions brought about by the "lens" we use to see things: our own minds. This is quite difficult to achieve because when we look at our lens, we are using our

Our bodies are our albatrosses, our crosses to bear and ulitmately, our undoing. We all live in bodies that eat, sleep, have other functions and eventually die. This is inconvenient to say the least and

The psyche can be occupied by symbols and archetypes that we are unaware of. Being undiscovered, they are free to affect our behavior unconsciously and therefore without our consent. Thus one of the goals

Why is something so common so hard to describe? Partly because it is so common. We're all "awake" most of the time. But wakefulness is not the equal of consciousness. I have had the fairly common

duplicate erased

Miguel Indurain--"Big Mig"--the Basque Spaniard who won five consecutive Tours de France in the early '90s, is by the standard of physical prowess one of the top few athletes in history. This