Book review: The Echo Maker
I began reading The Echo Maker, the latest novel by Richard Powers, with high hopes, but overall it was a disappointment. Powers is an intelligent writer of amb...
Author: Mary
Ancient observatory
This press release from Eurekalert from last month describes some discoveries about an ancient Peruvian observatory. I love observatories, and am fascinated by ...
The intelligence of ravens
I’ve always been amused by the rowdy wise-guy behavior of crows, and I greatly enjoyed David Quammen’s essay explaining bad-boy crows as classic cas...
Book review: The Varieties of Scientific Experience
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan. Penguin, 2006. Carl Sagan’s death in December 1996 at the ag...
Book review: The Creative Brain
The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Penguin, 2006. Creativity is something of a mystery. Where do brilliant innovative ideas come fro...
Too busy for beauty?
One rush hour morning in January, the Washington Post ran a little experiment: having renowned violinist Joshua Bell play at a Metro station with his open violi...
Spring fever!
We’ve had a wave of unusually warm weather here over the past couple of weeks; the early spring flowers are in full bloom and the trees are starting to sh...
Out-of-body and near-death experiences
Sometimes an out-of-body experience (OOBE) accompanies a near-death experience (NDE); OOBEs also happen sometimes during the transition between sleeping and wak...
The happiness set point reconsidered
The positive psychology movement, which studies happiness, is not really all that old, but it’s old enough for some of its findings to have become so wide...
Modeling the evolution of communication
This press release from EurekAlert describes some research into how communication strategies evolve among social creatures. This is a difficult area to study by...