I recently read Ben Wiker’s treatise 10 Books That Screwed Up the World: And 5 Others that Didn’t Help (Regnery, 2008). He chronicles the thoughts, writings, and impacts of Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, John Mill, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vladimir Lenin, Margaret Sanger, Simon Freud, Margaret Mead, Adolph Hitler and Alfred Kinsey. Often, these luminaries’ hallmark books […]
Emily 2.0 has been rapidly evolving. The next release will be my digital twin, hence it will be renamed Bill 3.0. The lovely young woman that embodied Emily’s persona will be replaced with the grumpy old man that is me. This is truly unfortunate but the twin construct will not otherwise work. Bill 3.0 will […]
Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988) presaged Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2004). Both books provide vivid explanations of how societies fail and why. Societies create mechanisms to deal with new challenges. Walls are built to thwart Mongol hoards. Regulations are created to deter […]
Consider two recent pieces in the New York Times: “How Animals See Themselves” by Ed Young, and “In a Parallel Universe, Another You” by Michio Kaku, both published on June 20th. Young reports that animals sense light, sounds, smells, etc. much differently than humans do. It helps them to identify food, mates, and other means […]
I have been thinking about the extent to which ideas are fleeting but institutions are sustaining. Certainly ideas can be cumulative in the sense that electricity led to communications then computing and eventually networking via digital devices and social media. This took roughly 150 years, but that is just a blip in the 6,000 years […]
