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It has been observed that if the last 50,000 years of man's existence were divided into lifetimes of approximately 62 years each, there have been 800 such lifetimes. Of the 800, fully 650 were spent in caves. Only during the last seventy lifetimes has it become possible to communicate effectively from one lifetime to…
A toddler falls and scrapes an elbow. A kindergartner loses a beloved pet. A fifth-grader faces a bully at school. When a child experiences painful, disappointing, or scary moments, it can be overwhelming, with big emotions and bodily sensations flooding the right brain. When this happens, we as parents can help bring…
People are living longer and societies are getting grayer. You hear about it all the time. You read about it in your newspapers. You hear about it on your television sets. Sometimes I'm concerned that we hear about it so much that we've come to accept longer lives with a kind of a complacency, even ease. But make no…
If you pick up a textbook on poetry and thumb the pages, you will see poems interspersed between explanations, explanations that English professors will call prose. Prose differs from poetry in that it is a major subcategory of how language is used. Prose encompasses all the normal uses: novels, texts, newspapers…
Why do studies end up with wrong findings? In fact, there are so many distorting forces baked into the process of testing the accuracy of a medical theory, that it’s harder to explain how researchers manage to produce valid findings, aside from sheer luck. To cite just a few of these problems: Mismeasurement To test…
It appears that the extremely important papers that trigger a revolution may not receive a proportionately large number of citations. The normal procedures of referencing are not used for folklore. A real scientific revolution, like any other revolution, is news. The Origin of Species sold out as fast as it could be…
Slavery in America was perpetuated not merely by human badness but also by human blindness. ... Men convinced themselves that a system that was so economically profitable must be morally justifiable. ... Science was commandeered to prove the biological inferiority of the Negro. Even philosophical logic was manipulated…
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers…
He was 40 yeares old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. 'By G—,' sayd he, (He would now and then sweare, by way of emphasis) 'By G—,' sayd he, 'this is impossible!' So he reads the…
The intellectual shortcomings of past and present newspapers are, however, beside the point, because the real difference between today's video and yesterday's print is not content but context--a context in which the proliferating visual images and noises of the video/digital age permeate the minute-by-minute…
"In this world, pregnancy is considered news, and it is a nine-month news cycle," the editor-in-chief of Star magazine has said. Issues featuring pregnant celebrities are often among the magazines' best sellers. The mother of all celebrity pregnancies, of course, was that of actress Demi Moore, who appeared naked and…
Think of the number of things you are likely to say to someone else today -- or the number of words you will hear other people speak. You might listen to the radio, watch television, have dinner with other people, help your children with the homework, answer the phone to people far away. Most of what is said in these…
Asymmetric attention is the key to another important concept, celebrity. Being famous means that a lot of people pay attention to you--after all, by definition it is famous people who appear on the cover of magazines, which are purchased because lots of people want to know what's happening with their favorite…
The result of the new economics is that people are often paid for their attention, implicitly or explicitly. They get to see television free in return for watching commercials. Their magazines and newspapers are subsidized or supplied free by advertisers. Nowadays bus shelters, baseball stadiums, and even those little…