poetics.info

I just finished listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers:  The Story of Success, which is really the story of extraordinary success—the kind that lies outside the bell curve, the kind achieved by Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, or the Beatles. I had been meaning to listen to Outliers for a while now because I really enjoyed [...]

I’ve been watching this story on Iran’s “election” build for weeks now; and I, like everyone in the U.S. just assumed that Friday’s vote would come and go and that Ahmadinejad would be reinstated, as dictators always are, and that would be that. Then, when I started to see images on blogs of rallies starting [...]

Sam Harris recently gave a lecture at an “atheist” conference where he shocked his audience by telling them their use of the label “atheist” is a huge mistake — “a mistake of some consequence,” to be exact. To understand the magnitude of his “seditious proposal,” you have to know that Harris is considered one of [...]

I happened across the winners of the top 10 best optical illusions today…this one of a pyramid is really cool!

Psychology is a relatively young science, if you consider it remained the province of philosophers until the late nineteenth century. Even today, despite a handful of notable exceptions, it lacks clear, unifying principles. Thankfully, we survived Freud’s subversion of the conscious mind, Skinner’s behaviorism and the social theorists to emerge in the era of the [...]

I can’t recommend the book Blink enough. (I should mention that my friend, Brian Schwartz, recommended it to me.) I actually listened to it on CD, and I highly recommend that experience, as well. Blink is about–well, Mr. Gladwell, says it best: It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens [...]