Number of words – 1,244  “HUMAN inventiveness…has still not found a mechanical process to replace horses as the propulsion for vehicles,” lamented Le Petit Journal, a French newspaper, in December 1893. Its answer was to organise the Paris-Rouen race for horseless carriages, held the following July. The 102 entrants included vehicles powered by steam, petrol, electricity, … Read more

Number of words – 688 Most religions and philosophies have consequently taken a very different approach to happiness than liberalism does. The Buddhist position is particularly interesting. Buddhism has assigned the question of happiness more importance than perhaps any other human creed. For 2,500 years, Buddhists have systematically studied the essence and causes of happiness, … Read more

Number of words – 343 One of the fields that benefited from the Cook expedition was medicine. At the time, ships that set sail to distant shores knew that more than half their crew members would die on the journey. The nemesis was not angry natives, enemy warships or homesickness. It was a mysterious ailment … Read more

NUmber of words – 337 As in Rome, so also in ancient China: most generals and philosophers did not think it their duty to develop new weapons. The most important military invention in the history of China was gunpowder. Yet to the best of our knowledge, gunpowder was invented accidentally, by Daoist alchemists searching for … Read more

Number of words – 636 The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, … Read more

Number of words – 3,942 If Facebook were a country, a conceit that founder Mark Zuckerberg has entertained in public, its 900 million members would make it the third largest in the world. It would far outstrip any regime past or present in how intimately it records the lives of its citizens. Private conversations, family … Read more

NUmber of words – 3,687 Privacy, as we understand it, is only about 150 years old. Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy. Section II will show how cutting edge health technology will force people to choose between an early, … Read more

Number of words – 1,995 Mark Zuckerberg drives a Volkswagen Golf. He pays himself an annual salary of a dollar. In 2006, at the age of 22, he turned down a billion times that for Facebook. In 2010, when his then-girlfriend (now wife) Priscilla Chan moved in to his home, he posted an update offering … Read more

Number of words – 1,371 Last month, DARPA announced the latest breakthrough in brain-controlled artificial limbs: a robotic arm that a user can actually feel. It works via neural implants that connect to a computer through an interface top of the user’s skull, and sends signals from there to the arm telling it how to … Read more

Number fo words – 1,470 Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant, an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return … Read more