MIT Physicist Proposes New "Meaning of Life" MIT physicist Jeremy England claims that life may not be so mysterious after all, despite the fact it is apparently derived from non-living matter. In a new paper, England explains how simple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. In other words, it would be more surprising to find no life in the universe than a buzzing place like planet Earth. What does all matter—rocks, plants, animals, and humans—have in common? [S]imple physical laws make complex life more likely than not. According to England, the second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning. [T]he second law of thermodynamics gives life its meaning. The strength of England's theory is that it provides an underlying physical basis for Darwin's theory of evolution and helps explain some evolutionary tendencies that evolution cannot. Here is Michio Kaku's concise explanation of the entire physical universe: Read more at Business Insider Photo credit: Shutterstock
10 Ways Manipulators Use Emotional Intelligence for Evil (and How to Fight Back) Emotional intelligence is nothing new. Sure, the term was coined in the 1960's, and popularized by psychologists in recent decades. But the concept of emotional intelligence--which I define as a person's ability to recognize and understand emotions and use that information to guide decision making--has been around as long as we have. This skill we refer to as emotional intelligence (also known as EI or EQ) is like any other ability: You can cultivate it, work to enhance it, sharpen it. And it's important to know that just like other skills, emotional intelligence can be used both ethically and unethically. The dark side of emotional intelligence Organizational psychologist and best-selling author Adam Grant identified EI at its worst in his essay for The Atlantic, The Dark Side of Emotional Intelligence: "Recognizing the power of emotions...one of the most influential leaders of the 20th century spent years studying the emotional effects of his body language. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
No Joke: Terry Jones Explains the Last (and Next) Financial Crisis When Thomas Carlyle first referred to economics as “the dismal science” in the 19th century, he meant the dismal, end-of-the-world predictions economists often made. Today, economics inspires dread not just with apocalyptic predictions, but also with deadeningly dull, distressingly dense complexity. If economics bores or frustrates you to tears, turn them into tears of laughter with former Monty Python member Terry Jones’ new documentary Boom Bust Boom—a look back at the 2008 world financial crisis and forward (perhaps) to the next one. Jones (shown above) demonstrates with humor, talking heads, animation, and puppet economists how the cycle of boom, bust, and boom’s rolled over people for centuries and how we might stop it from rolling over us again. Image: Terry Jones in a scene from Boom Bust Boom. What, you may ask, qualifies a comedian to talk about economics? Image: An animated version of Terry Jones in a scene from Boom Bust Boom. Image: An animated scene from Boom Bust Boom.
The Falling Man Do you remember this photograph? In the United States, people have taken pains to banish it from the record of September 11, 2001. The story behind it, though, and the search for the man pictured in it, are our most intimate connection to the horror of that day. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Associated Press The photographer is no stranger to history; he knows it is something that happens later. Richard Drew has never done that. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it. There was no terror or confusion at the Associated Press. He sent the image to the AP's server. They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. They began jumping not long after the first plane hit the North Tower, not long after the fire started. And so it went. It was no sideshow. Photographs lie.
Artist Who Lost A Friend Creates A Comic Tribute That’ll Inspire You To Drop Everything And Start Living Ever feel trapped by life? Ever wanted to quit your job, sell your car, and hit the open road with nothing but what you can carry on your back? Well as you can see from this inspiring comic tribute, the late Patrick Joseph Falterman II did just that. Patrick, who ran a website called hitchtheworld.com, recently died after the plane he was piloting crashed in Liberty County, Texas. More info: Things In Squares | Facebook | Hitchtheworld.com Thanks for sharing! 3x per week 30,000,000+ monthly readers Error sending email
When You Can't Afford to Make a Mistake, This’ll Keep You Sharp Peter Baumann suggests that our biases can get a bad rap, but that they’re essential. He sees them as unconscious inclinations that we’ve developed over time, and most of the time, they reflect actual knowledge we’ve acquired about how the world works. They set the frameworks within which we live our lives. Our bias toward feeling safe, for example, keeps us (mostly) out of trouble, while a bias towards certain flavors sets us parameters for selecting the dish we’d like to eat at a restaurant. There’s a category of not-so-helpful mental habits and inclinations called “cognitive biases.” Researchers have identified a number of these mind traps. Julia Galef has a great method for avoiding another common bias, the commitment effect. At Business Insider, Samantha Lee put together a great infographic showing 20 cognitive biases that can get in the way of solid decision-making.
Little Progress Has Been Made Since Einstein On The Physics Of Time : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture The star-forming area Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula, is a vast region of gas, dust and hot young stars that lies in the heart of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM hide caption toggle caption ESO/INAF-VST/OmegaCAM The star-forming area Messier 17, also known as the Omega Nebula or the Swan Nebula, is a vast region of gas, dust and hot young stars that lies in the heart of the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. Time is elusive and enigmatic. Quandaries and confusion about time date back as far as Aristotle and Augustine, and as recently as Einstein and Feynman. Physicists understand much about time, how its flow varies depending on velocity and gravity, but they haven't reached any consensus on why it flows at all. Consider the following remarkable statement: You are reading the word "now" right now. Until the 20th century, time was merely the stage on which the laws of physics were performed.
C. Nicole Mason on the 2016 Election and Poverty in America In terms of entertainment, the first Presidential debate was robust. In terms of bread and butter issues that matter to lower income families, it was less so. This year and last, we’ve heard a lot about protecting the middle class from tax increases, saving young learners from outrageous student debt, and giving big corporations a tax break, but there has been little to no discussion, from either side, about families and individuals who are trying to climb their way up to the middle class. There hasn’t been a silence this awkward since the self-awareness vacuum that was Mary J Blige singing to Hillary Clinton Politicians’ blind eye to poverty is hitting a raw nerve with Dr. C. Mason believes the U.S.’s most vulnerable suffer in silence because, in the public consciousness, poverty is seen as a black or Latino problem. According to Mason, there hasn’t been enough effort to close the gap nor has there even been theoretical discussion of how the U.S. would do so. Dr.
The Secret Life of Trees: The Astonishing Science of What Trees Feel and How They Communicate Trees dominate the world’s the oldest living organisms. Since the dawn of our species, they have been our silent companions, permeating our most enduring tales and never ceasing to inspire fantastical cosmogonies. Hermann Hesse called them “the most penetrating of preachers.” But trees might be among our lushest metaphors and sensemaking frameworks for knowledge precisely because the richness of what they say is more than metaphorical — they speak a sophisticated silent language, communicating complex information via smell, taste, and electrical impulses. Wohlleben chronicles what his own experience of managing a forest in the Eifel mountains in Germany has taught him about the astonishing language of trees and how trailblazing arboreal research from scientists around the world reveals “the role forests play in making our world the kind of place where we want to live.” But Wohlleben’s own career began at the opposite end of the caring spectrum. Why are trees such social beings?
How J.R.R. Tolkien Found Mordor on the Western Front Photo IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled . “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.” The 24-year-old Tolkien arrived in time to take part in the Battle of the Somme, a campaign intended to break the stalemate between the Allies and Central Powers. The first day of the battle, July 1, produced a frenzy of bloodletting. Before nightfall, 19,240 British soldiers — Prime Minister David Lloyd George called them “the choicest and best of our young manhood” — lay dead. Though the debt is largely overlooked, Tolkien’s supreme literary achievement, “The Lord of the Rings,” owes a great deal to his experience at the Somme. Continue reading the main story
When You Can't Afford to Make a Mistake, This’ll Keep You Sharp Peter Baumann suggests that our biases can get a bad rap, but that they’re essential. He sees them as unconscious inclinations that we’ve developed over time, and most of the time, they reflect actual knowledge we’ve acquired about how the world works. They set the frameworks within which we live our lives. Our bias toward feeling safe, for example, keeps us (mostly) out of trouble, while a bias towards certain flavors sets us parameters for selecting the dish we’d like to eat at a restaurant. There’s a category of not-so-helpful mental habits and inclinations called “cognitive biases.” Researchers have identified a number of these mind traps. Julia Galef has a great method for avoiding another common bias, the commitment effect. At Business Insider, Samantha Lee put together a great infographic showing 20 cognitive biases that can get in the way of solid decision-making.
Life Above Earth: An Introduction — Cultural Anthropology This began as a wondering about wind, how it mattered, how it materialized across lives, and how it seemed to refuse to be represented—only becoming visible through its effects on other beings and other things: branch, bird, cloud, kite, sail, smoke. Wind finds itself with no terrestrial home, no borders to maintain, no ownership to be claimed.1 Its pressured and oscillating gases are the kinetic energy of the sky. Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing. The curatorial force behind this first Openings and Retrospectives is to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied, to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered to worldly surfaces. We are air-born. These theoretical cartographies of space, sky, atmosphere, and air are moved by anthropology’s ongoing turn toward posthumanisms, ontologies, things, mattering, and new materialisms. We are air-born, but we are also dense beings.
What Were Albert Einstein's Political Opinions? Humanity As One One of Einstein's most important views of the world that stayed with him throughout his life? Internationalism and the connectedness of all humans. That, and many other concepts and precepts, defined Einstein's life beyond that of being a Theoretical Physicist, and they're clearly laid out with a plethora of historical cites and references in the new book Einstein and Twentieth-Century Politics: 'A Salutary Moral Influence', released in Autumn, 2016. Remember that he was born in an era where some cultures of the world were just beginning to be explored and understood. As we discovered more of the world, we began to be less … intolerant of others. But even when it came to, for example, Russia’s evolvement into the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution, there were some intellectuals who welcomed it — especially as an alternative to Western Capitalism. The Arms Race and Nuclear Weaponry “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”