ex astris vita

Discovery in South Africa pushes back the earliest human control of fire to one million years ago.

An example of how investing in basic research pays dividends in unexpected ways.

Did religion provide the means for our ancestors to go from small groups of hunter-gatherers to large societies of anonymous strangers?

T. Boone Pickens, world renowned financier, takes a national security approach to energy security.

I see the coming end of the human dominance of Go.

When naïvely extrapolating from current trends “Absurdity—or calamity—arrives fast at those rates.” This is one of my big beefs with Kurzweil et al. They take an exponential growth curve and believe it will continue at that pace forever.

There may be a break in the colony collapse disorder mystery.

What will our world look like without us? Ozymandias indeed.

Parts of our civilization have become very efficient. Our first reaction to the word efficient is usually completely positive, but we often forget that efficiency almost always comes as a tradeoff against resilience.