Sunday, February 21, 2021

Why We Have Difficulty Trusting Science

What do you call a priest that becomes a lawyer? A father in law.


To Understand The Problems With Big Tech Platforms We Need To Understand What’s At Risk

Harvesting data at scale makes us collectively vulnerable in ways that go beyond breaches of individual privacy. This is a new and nasty problem: even when individual rights are formally considered (e.g., via privacy consent forms), the consequences for society may be very harmful. – 3 Quarks Daily




Why Are So Many Writers Having Difficulty Writing During COVID?

“The problem with writing is it’s just another screen, and that’s all there is … I can’t connect with my imagination. I can’t connect with any creativity. My whole brain is tied up with processing, processing, processing what’s going on in the world.” – The Guardian



1,000-Year-Old Murals Identified In German Cathedral

“A series of frescoes showing the life and death of John the Baptist in the cathedral of the Bavarian city of Augsburg have been recently dated to the first decade of the 11th century, ranking them among the oldest wall paintings in a medieval church north of the Alps.” – The Art Newspaper



Why We Have Difficulty Trusting Science

Precisely the same methods, and precisely the same leaps of brilliance and faith that led in some cases to science that has withstood the test of centuries, led also to results that were rapidly cast into oblivion. Wish as we might, little more than the passage of time and thus hindsight tells us what was “good science” as opposed to a poor guess, based on faulty inferences and deep misunderstandings. – Los Angeles Review of Books



A Marketplace and a Temple: Ancient UrbanismLondon Review of Books


The penis: a life Aeon