In relative terms, the field of plate tectonics is still fairly new — becoming widely accepted only in the mid-1960’s. The idea that massive continents could have drifted apart over millions of years was, however, first expounded on by an amateur American geologist, Frank Bursley, in 1908. Bursley was struck by how the shape between…

Daniel Ariely’s excellent 16-minute presentation at TED:

Thomas Huxley once encouraged people to: "Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.” I really like this quote because we can all benefit a great deal from "thinking like a child.” A…

In honor of David Hume, today's addition to the anti-library is his book, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Related Posts Unlearning 101: Lesson 1 Unlearning 101: Lesson 2 Unlearning 101: Lesson 3

"Much of what we think we believe, we learned as a child, and to lead a fuller life you should never stop questioning what you do and looking at things in a new light." — Ellen Langer Until yesterday, I had no idea who Ellen Langer was. Now, I find myself wanting to purchase her…

It always pleased the Master to hear people recognize their ignorance. "Wisdom tends to grow in proportion to one's awareness of one's ignorance," he claimed. When asked for an explanation, he said, "When you come to see you are not as wise today as you thought you were yesterday, you are wiser today."                 – Anthony…

I first studiedElisabeth Kubler-Ross' "five stages of grief" in high school. Since then, I have accepted her theory. As Michael Shermer suggests in this articlein Scientific American there is little evidentiary support for her thesis. Part of the problem, I believe, is that people like to make life more tidy than it actually is. For…

”I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another and that is: I say that I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the argument against my position better than the people who support it….