Critical Thinking
The evolution engine consists of two parts: random generation of variety, and evaluation of it according to some criteria. For biological organisms this process of mutation and differential survival is called Darwinism or natural selection, for businesses it is innovation and profit in the free market, and for ideas it is hypothesis and testing of the scientific method. In the first two cases, nature does the evaluating, but in the third it is up to human analysis and debate. One of the greatest obstacles to achieving truth is the difficulty our monkey brains have in thinking logically. Fortunately, the most common logical traps and pitfalls have been conveniently named and catalogued:
Check out Mike Reed's Flame Warriors for an amusing roster of discussion forum denizens who use and abuse the above fallacies.
String Theory
For the first time in human history, fundamental
understanding the nature of the universe is within reach. The human
genome is nearly mapped, computer science has lead us to new
understandings of information and consciousness, and String Theory promises a unifying Theory of Everything. The math
involved is to blow one's cerebral cortex, but you can find out more at the Official String Theory Web Site (um, who elected them?), the String Theory Home Page, or About.com's copious string theory material. Brian Greene's The Elegant Universe is an excellent book on the subject. For an MPEG video clip of a collapsing six-dimensional Calabi-Yau figure, check out the
Calabi-Yau home page.
Open Source
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Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen a angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
--Linus Torvalds
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The Open Source movement is a fascinating emergent phenomenon. Why would people volunteer countless hours of their time toward a project for no money or even any ownership rights? Is this a counter-example to the need for firm property rights as a prerequisite for success? According to Eric Raymond, in his classic Homesteading in the Noosphere, we do it for the sake of reputation within a community. Man (and especially men) has a hard-wired instinct to maintain reputation through gift-giving. In the old days, and in some societies to this day, a fortunate hunter shared his kill with the tribe. The rise in his status or reputation was like money in the bank, which he could then cash in for favors at a later date. With a strong foundation in human psychology, economics, and software development techniques, the Open Source method looks like the horse to bet on, and investors in recent Linux-related IPOs obviously agree.
You can read Raymond's writings at the above links, or get the collected works in his recent book The Cathedral and the Bazaar, or read others' views in Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution.
Some psychologists theorize that there exists a definite counter-dominance instinct, which leads to resentment against successful hunters who are insufficiently generous. This would explain the Open Source movement's hatred of Bill Gates, and the latter's recent spate of large charitable donations.
The Clock of the Long Now
Traveling by train through Europe, one can't help but notice that the central building of each town is its church. In one of the great cities, such as Paris or Cologne, the cathedrals are simply overwhelming: they represent man's yearning for the divine, for Truth. In the modern age this quest for truth is conducted by scientists and scholars, and while not every town can have a university, the grandest building should be the library. Human intellect alone does not separate us much from our cousins the apes--for hundreds of thousands of years we lived little better than they. It is only the accumulation of knowledge that has over time raised us up, and we should acknowledge it with respect. The Clock of the Long Now project aims to create both such a library and a millenial clock, to raise our awareness of timescales greater than what we evolved to think about, and our sense of responsibility toward the future. Read about the project in Stewart Brand's book The Clock of the Long Now.
XML and UML
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty", and EXtensible Markup Language (XML) and the Unified Modeling Language (UML) are the languages of truth as well as elegant and beautiful in themselves. There have been many imcompatible and competing ways to represent information in the past, but these new Esperantos of information will enable new levels of describing, capturing, and sharing knowledge.
Stokke Knee Chairs
Stokke knee chairs are an elegant solution to the workspace problem, worth it for anyone who spends a substantial fraction of his life with eyes locked on a computer monitor half a meter away. Norwegian Peter Opsvik designed a chair that balances to the human body, which wasn't designed for chairs. Brace yourself for sticker shock.