‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by neglect.’

Ehrenfeld (2008) concurs with McDonough and Braungart, in his plea for a holistic approach towards sustainability: “Our society is addicted to reductionist ways of solving virtually all our problems. ... Over time, as we engage more and more in this practice, society’s (as well as individual’s) competence to address the complicated, messy problems we confront has diminished. Unsustainability is just such a messy problem. Reductionism will not make it go away.” (Ehrenfeld, 2008, p. 11-12)

Mark had his own reservations. “I don’t want to do it just because it’s what we’re supposed to do,” he said. “I only want to live together if it’ll make our lives better.”

I worried that the minutiae of domesticity would change us into petty creatures who bickered over laundry.

For me, capitalism is fundamentally necessary as a transitional system

The trend of deeply negative reporting still serves the corporate culture, because if people just feel doom and gloom, then you might as well just keep buying a bunch of crap, eat hamburgers, and chain smoke cigarettes because there's no future anyway.

Lietaer proposes that we could create a global trading currency he names the Terra that would have a “demarrage” charge or negative interest rate.

In fact, we are seeing increasing automation in many fields that will eliminate millions of industrial jobs over the next decades. An interesting question is - what are people supposed to do once all of the old industrial jobs have disappeared? Retraining people to be custodians and stewards of their local lands, teaching them to grow food, combining the best knowledge from the present and past, could be socially beneficial on many levels.

Every time a customer service assistant shrugs and says “computer says no” or an organization acts in crazy, inflexible ways, odds-are there’s a database underneath which has a limited, rigid view of reality and it’s simply too expensive to fix the software to make the organization more intelligent. We live in these boxes, as pervasive as oxygen, and as inflexible as punched cards.

But brain interfaces can also put information in. Meaning a clever hacker might be able to change your thoughts or your vote or your identity or make you want to do something terrible you normally wouldn’t ever consider.

And then if we just give him a few extra legs, some hair, take his arms off, and stretch him out—we have a neuron.

The magic of the folds in increasing the napkin’s size is clear when we put another brain on top of our stripped-off cortex:

This is why people can play the piano with their fingers but not with their toes.

Of course, if you want to put a positive spin on this kind of work, you can call it flexible, decentralized micro-entrepreneurship. But pan out, and it looks more like feudalism, with thousands of small subsistence farmers paying tribute to a baron that grants them access to land they don’t own.

I have had IBS essentially all my life. At least as far back as I can remember. This is a very interesting experiement. Hopefully scientists can use this as a springboard for either further research, or ideally, to find a solution. IBS negatively impacts quality of life for many sufferers.

Comments on this article can be posted to the web via the link at the bottom of this page.

Basically, an organism experiences too much or too little of something either within them or around them in the environment (i.e. something deviates from neutrality or optimum balance), which is then detected by our brains (i.e. via neural maps of the body).

Even if one were to accept on principle the suggestion by animal philosophers and activists that if we experiment on animals we ought to be experimenting on impaired human patients, that population would not be best suited for scientific studies.

What’s more, when COP21 negotiators were asked about how confident they were in their scientific understandings of temperature rise, they showed no more confidence than the MBA students they were tested against. While it’s one thing to have a group of over-confident (probably millennial) MBA students, it’s another to have international climate negotiators reporting an average confidence level of about 4 out of 7 in their own understandings of temperature rise. 

“it is as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”8

If you had shown a hunter-gatherer our world of indoor comfort, technology, and endless abundance, it would have seemed like fictional magic to him

Unfortunately, penicillin was ineffective against the rabbit's infection. Disappointed, Fleming set the drug aside for a decade, as the rabbits had "proved" the drug was useless as a systemic medication.Years later, he administered the drug in desperation to a dying patient, for whom all other treatments were ineffectual. The penicillin performed a miracle, and the rest is history.

Had Fleming himself carried out a simple and well established animal test - the mouse protection test - the potential of his discovery might have been realised 10 years earlier

Go to your closet. Hold each piece of clothing, each accessory, and each shoe in your hands. Now ask yourself,“Does this spark joy?”Does it make you feel pretty or handsome when you wear it? If it does then keep it. If not, get rid of it (harsh, I know).

Seth Lloyd’s “Programming the Universe”

They get off track, they start talking about other things that have nothing to do with the original article. If it’s an even vaguely political topic, you’ve got the partisans jumping in, yelling at one another, how they’re all idiots.