It would seem that those among us human beings who are lucky enough to travel to space, and are able to view the earth from high above the atmosphere, return to us with a profoundly different and new perspective of their home, and the implications of this new view of the world are far from trivial. From that distance, and floating peacefully around the planet, the mind wanders into an almost meditative state, one where the human...

  This month, while in a Twitter hiatus, I managed to get around to reading a book. Yes, a real book, with paper and pages and a cardboard cover! The book I chose to read is by Dr Richard Dawkins, and this is one that is overlooked in terms of its importance and place in society, having been overshadowed by his more groundbreaking and most famous publications such as “The Blind Watchmaker”, “The Selfish Gene” and of...

  What does 2013 hold for us in terms of violence, morality and science? Steven Pinker, professor at Harvard University, gives his predictions for this coming year, in terms of discovery, social and cultural progress, and also gives an insight into why he see the future with a cautious optimism that’s hard to refute. This interview with The Economist’s Lane Greene was recorded at “The Economist’s World in 2013...

  “Anthropocene” is a term used as a chronological geological marker to show the extent to which humanity has had an effect on the natural environment of our planet. It’s an informal term, but one that I believe encapsulates much of what environmentalists and scientists have been saying for some time about human activities, and the extent to which we have been shaping our environment. Unlike the “Pleistocene”...

Below is a great interview via Big Think with Dr Oliver Sacks, about the predisposition of the human brain toward storytelling and mythology. His answers in this video mirror closely many of my own on the subject. The complete transcript is below the video. Transcript Question: Is the human brain predisposed to create myths? Oliver Sacks:  Yeah. First I would say that the human brain or the human mind is disposed to create stories or...

Traditionally (and I’m talking well before any guy named Jesus was apparently born of a virgin in the Middle-East), the winter solstice was a celebration of the shortest day of the year, one where the sun and its heat would gradually return to the earth in the form of increasingly longer days after the long cold winter. Of course, this celebration was warranted, and was a massive morale booster, after so many months in ice and snow with...