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This panel from the Sistine Chapel was never given a name by Michelangelo, though it is commonly referred to as "The Creation of Adam." I don't think I'm the only one puzzled by this description. Adam has obviously already been created, so what's God doing now? And why does God appear to be struggling to reach out and touch an Adam who couldn't care less? God seems to be gathering his loyal legions around him while reaching out for one more who appears to be casually telling God to go ahead without him. Could this be a representation, not of God in the act of creation, or even in the act of endowing man with self-knowledge, but of humanity in the act of rejecting God -- the birth, that is, of humanism? That God and his angels together form a remarkably precise outline of the human brain is, I think, no coincidence; it might very well be a symbol of God as a creation of the mind rather than the reverse. Click on the image above to go to site where you can view...

I don't need further convincing. Check out the BBC article .

Lee Smolin, in his book The Trouble with Physics , complains that his generation of theoretical physicists dropped the ball. In the early 1970’s graduate students like himself were sure they were close to a major revolution in humanity’s understanding of the universe. But just when a “theory of everything” seemed to be within reach, theoretical physics divided into ideological camps and began arguing philosophy and metaphysics rather than investigating the meaning of experimental results and the testability of their hypotheses. In the last 50 years, industry, government and individual entrepreneurs have been busy applying the knowledge gained in the previous 500. Up until 1960, even Newton’s laws were fundamentally untested. It wasn’t until the first earth-orbiting satellites that even those most basic laws of physics could be demonstrated unambiguously. Technology has been rapidly advancing since, and today its routine to use the equations of quantum electrodynamics in the design of c...

Why isn't this Nobel-Prize-winning economist ever interviewed on American television? Check out this interview from Italy.

In objecting to Saul’s description of the current Western technocracy as a “dictatorship of reason,” a couple of us made the point last night that reason has really never been given a chance, that reason has always been pushed aside by irrational forces -- apocalyptic Christianity, racism and other skewed ideologies. That the rational method was revived in the late Middle Ages to support and legitimize those very same “irrational” institutions could be dismissed as a simple disagreement over definitions. But at the same time, I think we all agree that the process of defining terms is much more than an intellectual exercise, or a nuanced strategy for scholastic debate. At the heart of the matter, I think, is the important difference between prescriptive and descriptive dictionaries. Pre scriptive dictionaries use definitions to produce the desired result, like when scholars in the Middle Ages carefully parsed Biblical passages to remove contradictions in scripture, or when modern-day pu...