Maybe you've had this experience:  You are thinking about an acquaintance that you haven't thought about in a long time and at that moment the phone rings.  "What are the odds that it's Jerry?" you think to yourself.  And when it IS Jerry on the other line it seems somehow magical, amazing, beyond mere...

I’ve always been struck by the historical uniqueness of ancient Greece.  The most amazing and radical transitions were experienced by the culture(s) present around the Aegean sea during only a few centuries.  The most striking thing about the transformation was the rise of a thinking that started to take itself as its own object. ...

I’m actually somewhat uncomfortable calling Paleolithic renderings “art” – not because they don’t meet some standard set of criterion, but because of the very nature of the ‘calling’ itself seems to go against the experience of the makers of the art.  See, there again, an assumption: “the makers of the art”, which includes a...

Bifurcations are "splits" in the way a system develops from one state to the next.  Think of them as two roads diverging in a yellow wood; one leads to some unknown mystery.  The other leads to MILKSHAKES (stay tuned). My understanding is that bifurcations are always relative (did that paradox slip by you?); depending upon...