Author: Adam Lee

As you may be aware, this past Sunday was Everybody Draw Mohammed Day, in which freethinkers are exhorted to draw pictures of Mohammed to reaffirm their right to free expression in the face of Islamist demands for censorship. I grant that there’s room for debate over how much good this accomplishes directly, and some online…

In Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, there’s a chapter titled “Maxwell and the Nerds” about James Clerk Maxwell, the Scottish physicist who discovered the four equations that govern electricity and magnetism. There’s a passage in this chapter that I think perfectly sums up the moment that all scientists strive for. Many renowned ancient and medieval…

I love this new song, “Satellite“, by the folk singer Anna Dagmar, from her upcoming album of the same name. It’s a (I assume) autobiographical account of growing up in a home with a scientist father and a religious mother – “the Story of Creation meets the Big Bang”, as her website says. I first…

Earlier this week I caught a post on Lindsay Beyerstein’s blog Duly Noted, highlighting a horrifying NYT story wrestling with the question of whether children can be psychopaths, and if so, whether they’re doomed to grow up into adult psychopaths or whether there’s any intervention that can be effective. “Psychopath” isn’t a general term for…

It must be a terribly confusing time to be a member of the Vatican hierarchy. In an effort to stem the accelerating exodus of Catholic laypeople, they’ve been cracking down on suspected heretics left and right – on nuns who help the poor too much, on priests who want to change the rules of ordination,…

Just a quick note: In the past few days, I’ve had several complaints about the auto-playing video ads on the right sidebar. Rest assured, I find them just as annoying as you all do. I’ve written to the management at Big Think, and I’ve had assurances that they’ve already been changed so that the sound…

In a previous post about debating on Twitter, I wrote that I conduct most debates these days through the Socratic method. I find this more effective than arguing by assertion, since believers can reply to that with the standard apologetic counter-assertions, most of which they can reel off without even thinking about them. If we…

For a mental health break, this weekend I wanted to write about something extremely cool: 3D printing, an emerging technological trend that’s been covered by, among others, the Telegraph, the Economist, PC World, as well as right here at Big Think’s IdeaFeed. As opposed to traditional “subtractive” methods of carving or sculpting, 3D printing is…

I’ve just finished reading Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature, an extraordinary book that I think deserves wider attention. I want to write a full review, but this book is far too vast (696 pages!) and too broad in scope to do it justice in a single post, so I plan to split…

The Secular Coalition for America has hired a new executive director, and their choice is going to raise some eyebrows: Edwina Rogers, a Republican lobbyist and attorney with a long history of supporting conservative causes. Among other things, she’s worked as an advisor to George W. Bush’s National Economic Council, served as a general counsel…