In today's column, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com offers links to numerous credible resources that document: 1. That the U.S. Government has illegally spied on thousands of Americans and continues to illegally spy on Americans. 2. That the White House blatantly lies about this gross misuse of government power; 3. That…
A new Salon.com book review gives us the depressing and infuriating answers to how much the Iraq adventure is costing the citizens of the United States. The book, written by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes, is titled "The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict." In…
Slate's Nancy Nall Derringer tells you how easy it can be to nail a plagiarist: I spent much of last Friday being congratulated for "brilliant reporting" that consisted of a minute's worth of typing on my laptop. That's how long it took for me to notice what seemed to be…
We do many inefficient things. Why don’t we simply do those things differently, in a more efficient way? Often, we don’t change things because we’ve done them a certain way for so long that it would take too much time and psychological effort to do them in new ways, even though the new ways would be easier and more inefficient in the long run.
The QWERTY keyboard is a great example. We could rearrange our keyboards, which would cause us to struggle with our new configurations for a few months or years, but then we’d all be better for the change. We don’t do this, however. It would take too much initial effort.
Scientific theories are quite often strained by the discovery of new evidence that doesn’t fit the theory, yet we cling to the old inadequate theories. This is another tendency toward path dependence. For example, until the 17th century, “epicycles” were used to explain the perceived retrograde motion of planets and stars. Epicycles were finally discarded in response to Kepler’s work. Philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn pointed out that scientific progress does not occur smoothly, but rather in the form of periodic revolutions that that he termed paradigm shifts. The fact that scientists tend to hold onto old unworkable theories longer than they should can be seen as another manifestation of path dependence.
It would make a lot of sense to simplify the spellings of many words used in the English language. We don’t do …
I've spent a lot of time studying Republican political anatomy. You see, I'm not only an armchair anthropologist, but I'm a social neuro-surgeon (a brand-new expertise, created today). After careful review of all available relevant data, I have developed a precise chart (click on the thumbnail below) detailing each of…