Category: Thinking Meat Project

Characters in novels, movies, and other fictions can seem quite real (we root for one and boo another, for example, and cry sometimes when one of them dies). Ye...

I’m reading Adam Bede, by George Eliot, and I’ve noticed that she opens several chapters with an invitation to the reader to view a scene as she des...

A friend recently sent me a link to a Pandora station he had created and thought I might like. That got me started exploring Pandora (an Internet music service ...

I have always been prone to nostalgia, even when you would have thought I was too young for it. It’s easy to regard this tendency as a character weakness;...

OK, this story is a bit off-topic for this blog, but it’s just too cool not to post. The Antikythera Mechanism, a 2100-year-old device that calculated and...

The other day I was struggling with a particularly difficult editing assignment, and when I took a break, I said to a friend that it was so frustrating it made ...

A time-worn joke about humans is that we’re nothing more than water’s way of getting from one place to another. What if living things in general beg...

One possible way to unify a big-history narrative is to use the theme of growing complexity in the universe. Stuart Kauffman studies complexity and self-organiz...