Thomas Paine on the Cost of Liberty
Powerful words from Thomas Paine, spoken September 11, 1777:
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
Powerful words from Thomas Paine, spoken September 11, 1777:
“Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom, must, like men, undergo the fatigues of supporting it.”
I recently posted several humorous pictures illustrating the risks of assuming that correlation amounts to causation. But now comes along another interesting picture, that practically forces me to abandon scientific rigor and embrace the inevitable conclusion – that chocolate consumption leads to genius: Is everybody on board with my reasoning? (Click here to view comments)
“An extroverted mathematician, goes an old joke, is one who looks at your feet while he’s talking.” Alex Stone recounts this joke in his book, Fooling Houdini, which I wrote about in a previous post. As a philosophy major, I love to think there might be a college major more full of nerds and introverts…
From time to time in this blog, I take a moment to celebrate fine writing. Here is an example I came across in an article in Smithsonian magazine from May 2014. The author, Corey Powell , was trying to explain how astronomers use gravitational “tug” to indirectly reveal the existence of planets. In other words, they can’t…
As a behavioral scientist, I have long been interested in self-deception. But I’ve never thought about it this way before, as pictured in a tremendous drawing by Jonathan Bartlett: (Click here to view comments)
In 1996, a man wrote to Carl Sagan asking him the distance to heaven. Sagan was a very public agnostic. He replied brilliantly: “Thanks for your letter. Nothing like the Christian notion of heaven has been found out to about 10 billion light years. (One light year is almost six trillion miles.) With best wishes…”…
Here are some details on a live web chat I’m having on Friday. Feel free to send in some fun questions.