August 30, 2018 Pleasure and the Good Life A happy life is built on pleasures such as sex and food, but also company and variety Pleasure, despite being central to human experience and evolution, is quite hard to define. Aristotle argued that what we call pleasure is comprised of least two distinct aspects, hedonia (pleasure) and eudaimonia (human flourishing or a life well-lived). However, as Morten Kringelbach, associate professor and senior research fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, points out this instalment of Aeon’s In Sight series: ‘It’s surprisingly difficult to show that somebody who is happy is also somebody who has had a lot of pleasure.’
August 30, 2018 Jack's Signs | One Man's War on ICE An 82-year-old white guy wasn't the person I pictured hanging NO ICE signs. I had seen these home-made posters popping up over freeways for past three years, "who is making these signs?" I wondered. Jack estimates he hangs 500 signs a year. He likes the honks and thumbs-ups he gets from cars passing under him as he hangs the signs—for him, it's about a human connection.
August 28, 2018 Number Words and the Human Body There are many possible ways to organize a number system for counting. Our number words reflect a base-10 or “decimal” system but there’s no reason we couldn’t just as well have ended up with a different kind of system. Or is there?
August 23, 2018 Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration ReMade in Chicago, Baumgartner Restoration is a second-generation art conservation studio in Chicago. Follow Julian as he completely restores a damaged painting.
August 22, 2018 Your Private Messages Might Travel Under This Beach In Porthcurno, Cornwall, there's an old telegraph cable landing station. It's how Britain talked to the Empire -- and it's now a museum. But the technology here isn't quite as obsolete as you might think.
August 21, 2018 Trade: Last Week Tonight Donald Trump is waging a trade war that hurts a lot of American workers. Maybe he would understand that if our heavy-handed documentaries about the global trading system were more informative.
August 17, 2018 I Hit 3,000-Year-Old Art with a Hammer The White Horse, in Uffington, is one of the oldest surviving works of art in Britain: carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire 3,000 years ago. Every year, it's rechalked by volunteers co-ordinated through the National Trust, a line of maintenance going back to before England had written history.
August 16, 2018 5 Devastating Security Flaws You've Never Heard Of Devastating vulnerabilities are hiding in the technology in programs, protocols, and hardware all around us. Most of the time, you can find ways to protect yourself.
August 10, 2018 New York Public Library’s Collection of Weird Objects A lock of Walt Whitman’s hair, Jack Kerouac’s boots, and Virginia Woolf’s cane are just a few of the items of literary paraphernalia available at the New York Public Library's Berg Collection—if you have an appointment.
August 9. 2019 When Birds Had Teeth Experts are still arguing over whether Archaeopteryx was a true bird, or a paravian dinosaur, or some other kind of dino. But regardless of what side you’re on, how did this fascinating, bird-like animal relate to today’s birds? It turns out its teeth were a clue that this story goes all the way back to what we now call the non-avian dinosaurs.
August 8, 2018 Secrets of the Bat Wing The spectacular flight of bats may be aided by long, thin muscles in the skin of their wings. Researchers at Brown University studied bats in a wind tunnel to understand exactly how these muscles enable flight.
August 6, 2018 Testing The Sound Mirrors That Protected Britain Tom Scott tests a 90-year-old piece of technology that was meant to be part of Britain's air defence. The Sound Mirrors, on Romney Marsh, were built in the late 1920s as a way to amplify the sound from aircraft engines over the English Channel.
August 2, 2018 All Creative Work Is Derivative Question Copyright's second "Minute Meme," illustratesd how all creative work builds on what came before.
August 1, 2018 Hong Kong in 1949 When Michael Rogge arrived in Hong Kong it was still recovering from the war. It had 2 million inhabitants. Huge numbers of refugees came pouring in from China. This is what the British colony looked like then.
