Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has given states final say over if and when abortions are legal, the political debates over abortion rights will intensify in legislatures and courthouses around the nation. Many of those discussions will hinge on the question of when, exactly, is the beginning of a human life that could – […]
It is not an exaggeration to say that the question of where and when the Black Death, the deadliest pandemic ever, originated is one of the biggest mysteries in human history. After all, the Black Death was the first wave of the second plague pandemic of the 14th to early 19th centuries. It killed some […]
Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be, That machines should e’er surpass our art. We are the masters, them the slaves, And thus it ever shall be so! They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn Only what we bid them learn, no more. They cannot understand the heart Or beauty of our words, you see […]
This column seems to be gaining a new subcategory, which we could name ‘Wokism as the latest historians’ epidemic’ or something like that. I have already written a couple of reviews of recent books that tried to awaken us from our outdated, Eurocentric, rationalistic and neoliberal assumptions about the essence of history (Graeber’s and Wengrow’s […]
Have you ever been in a situation in which irony was misunderstood as sincerity? For example, let’s say you’re at a clothing store with a friend of yours and you see a really ugly shirt on display. You say “Look! What a nice shirt!”. The next thing you know, your friend decides to buy you […]
Machine-learning systems are increasingly worming their way through our everyday lives, challenging our moral and social values and the rules that govern them. These days, virtual assistants threaten the privacy of the home; news recommenders shape the way we understand the world; risk-prediction systems tip social workers on which children to protect from abuse; while […]
In 2021, an investment firm bought 2,000 acres of real estate for about USD 4 million. Normally this would not make headlines, but in this case the land was virtual. It existed only in a metaverse platform called The Sandbox. By buying 792 non-fungible tokens on the Ethereum blockchain, the firm then owned the equivalent […]
Since the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of people studying Ukrainian on Duolingo, a language learning website and mobile app, has increased by more than 500%. Most of those who are taking up Ukrainian are probably unaware that there is a long-running controversy about this particular form of speech. One side views […]
As we saw in the first entry of this series, traditionally the idea of theoreticity had been understood as a kind of ‘negative’ concept, for theoretical entities or properties were thought about as those that cannot be observed; hence, ‘theoretical’ was more or less a synonym of ‘ un -observable’. Things started to change around […]
It is not risky at all to assert that fundamental physics has not been in good shape in the last forty years or so, not because of lack of work, talent, conjectures and resources, but because few really big advances (as big as, say, the discovery of thermodynamics, of relativity, of quantum field theory, or […]