Abandoned Footnotes

Things that caught my eye in the last week or so: I had not known that in some societies, paternity is thought to be "partible" ,...

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, writt...

The Pompeii worm (photo credit: Wikimedia commons ). After  water bears (which are apparently pretty common - I didn't know, but you c...

(Warning: some thinking out loud about some passages of Cicero and Machiavelli, in the course of doing some research for a work in progress ...

Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999). This is a book about human “political nature.”...

I sometimes come across articles like this , where things like the following are said: He said that plants used information encrypted in t...

(Warning: 1500 words on a somewhat technical problem in political philosophy). A couple of days ago I went to a talk about the distinction b...

Things that caught my eye over the past week or so: Automated debt-collection lawsuits . This is like something out of one of my favorite SF...

Cute, no ? These creatures can withstand the vacuum of space and suspend their metabolism for up to ten years. They can also survive being h...

In a post I wrote three years ago, before I abandoned this blog for the first time (in accordance with its name) I mentioned a passage in P...

Epstein and Axtell, Growing Artificial Societies (1996). I've become very interested in the "artificial societies" approac...

The toughest of them all . Will sustain a radiation dose between 5 and 15 thousand times higher than the dose that would kill a human being,...

Chuck Close apparently suffers from face blindness . [! - via marginal revolution ] DuPont's solution to the problem of securing explosi...