A Star for Everyone Who Ever Lived

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living. Since the dawn of time, roughly a hundred billion human beings have walked the planet Earth. Now this is an interesting number, for by a curious coincidence there are approximately a hundred billion stars in our local universe, the Milky Way. So for every man who has ever lived, in this Universe there shines a star. But every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and...

 Social Networks Limit Interaction to "Autistic" Levels

It is hardly surprising that many participants find social interactions on Friendster formulaic. The social structure is defined by a narrow set of rules that do little to map the complexities and nuances of relationships in other contexts. Formula-driven social worlds require everyone to engage with each other through a severely diminished mediator—what I have else- where called autistic social software, as a metaphor to signal the structured formula that autistic individuals learn to nego...

 China and India Aborting Millions of Fetuses

Williamson’s wise advice went unheeded. In the years after her study was published in 1978, ultrasound became increasingly available in Singapore and other countries in South and East Asia. The introduction of this technology enabled a new and brutal form of sex selection: if the sonogram shows it’s a girl, abort. Researchers’ estimates of the number of female fetuses aborted over the past twenty years are mind-boggling: ten million in India, twenty million in China. Because of this pra...