You’ve Just Stolen a Priceless Artifact – What Happens Next?
How can the Louvre thieves—if they’re still out there—capitalize on their haul?
Read more...Category Archives: Curiousities
Coffee Break: Vaccines Continued, Ancient Art, Renewables, Ignis Fatuus Explained, Good Sleep, and Jane Goodall
This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 752 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Read about why we’re doing this […]
Read more...Charlie Kirk and the Making of an AI-Generated Martyr
In the US, death and mythmaking are useful tools weilded to dictate the terms of public life.
Read more...Satyajit Das: On Reading – Textual Pleasures
On the role of reading, particulalry for book lovers.
Read more...“You Are My Friend”: Early Androids and Artificial Speech
Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech.
Read more...Book Review: This Is Your Brain On Nature
In “Nature and the Mind,” Marc Berman uses neuroscience to show how interacting with nature benefits mental health.
Read more...Dissecting My Recent Argument (Are Error Theories Offensive?)
How do people consume arguments or make sense of them in a discursive environment devoid of generally-accepted notions of what makes an argument good or successful?
Read more...Coffee Break: Beware the Jargon, Chocolate(!), Arsenic Life Final Update, Death Becomes Us, and the Scopes Trial,
Part the First: Beware Scientific Jargon. But everyone here already knows that. Nevertheless, this is a perpetual challenge for every scientist and other scholar who wants to be understood by our fellow citizens without “dumbing it down.” Scientific jargon can be ‘satisfying’ — but misleading. Jargon works especially well for those of my tribe who […]
Read more...Skyscrapers of Babel: How Ancient Mesopotamia Shaped the Modern City
In the early 20th century, architects and artists like Hugh Ferriss drew on the myths and monuments of ancient Babylon to imagine futuristic skylines—melding ziggurats with modernism in a visionary blend of the past and the possible.
Read more...The Incredible Impact of Ozzy Osbourne, from Black Sabbath to Ozzfest to 30 Years of Retirement Tours
We depart from our usual programming to commemorate the death of Ozzy Osbourne.
Read more...Can This Industry Be Saved? The Case of Natural Diamonds
The once prized diamond is now merely a natural diamond and losing ground to its cheaper manufactured cousins.
Read more...Satyajit Das: On Cinema – Francis Ford Coppola’s Operas & Chamber Pieces
A break from our regular programming in the form of revisiting some of Francis Ford Coppola’s classics.
Read more...Coffee Break: Ancient Food Facts, Cancer Therapy, the Conscious Brain, and Biohacking with Biotech…Plus Thomas Jefferson
On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise. Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating. Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse. Now we know which fish […]
Read more...Holiday Special: Dimash Sings Edith Piaf’s Hymne à l’Amour
mash, who has credibly (and often) been called the world’s best singer, does it again.
Read more...Coffee Break: Funding Medical Education, A Human Ancestor, Tardigrades to the Rescue, Trashing the Earth, Plus MAHA and Measles
Part the First: Financing Professional Education in the United States. College costs too much in the United States. Professional School costs way to much. Up until the present – who knows what will happen next as the broad attacks on American universities continue – graduate education at the PhD level in traditional disciplines in the […]
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