The Novel as a Tool for Survival

Here’s hoping.

Why Bullshit is no Laughing Matter

Harder to detect when we want to agree with it. 

All 2.3 Million Species

Mapped into a Single Circle of Life.

Newly Discovered

Plastic-eating bacterium. 

Taste Buds

Complementary Flavours

Fantasy North

What explains the icy northern grip on our imagination?

The Microbe-Scope

Fun with Infectious Disease.

Salt in the Silver, Silver in the Salt

I wrote about it first, in Orion’s Cartwheel.

The Jelly Bean Problem

You with me? 

How the Japanese Diet Became the Japanese Diet

Within one generation.

What It’s Like

To Be the Only Doctor in Space.

A Bach Cello Piece Played Atop a Mountain

As exhilarating as you’d expect.

In this Edition of Island Writer.

Benson, from Westwood Lake Chronicles.

World’s First Pocket Spectrometer

Measure the molecular makeup of anything.

Too Good to Be True

What matters is not that the probability of systemic failure is tiny but how it compares to the probability of consistency.

Why Smart People Are Stupid

The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

What Your Adult Life Looks Like In 13 Painfully Accurate Graphs

Your whole life on the X and Y axes.

Courtesy of Cousin Dan

They Don’t Build ’Em

Intelligent Design

Antarctica

From Space.

Half-Earth

Half of the Earth’s surface and seas must be dedicated to the conservation of nature, or humanity will have no future.

How We Lost the Moon

The moon has always enchanted dreamers, but Apollo is a fading memory and routine lunar travel seems as remote as ever.

Against the Dying of the Light

The final days of writers at the end.

Theme of the Great New Zealand Novel

The days of gold, the great Maori and Pakeha navigators, the whalers and pirates, the kauri bushmen and the gum diggers, and the fierce tribal battles that left the sands white with bones- God’s own, a good keen man alone. The Bolthole.

Next

Madagascar.

New Zealand Flag Referendum

Enters final stage.

We Are Hopelessly Hooked

We can’t defend ourselves against the disciples of captology by asking nicely for less enticing slot machines.

Cognitive Celebrity

Albert Einstein was a genius, but he wasn’t the only one.

What Does it Feel Like to be Dead?

He spent three years wooing Wanda Kosakiewicz. Then Camus turned up and within days slept with her. Sartre never forgave him.

The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

The math has been rigged.

When Groucho Marx Lectured T.S. Eliot

As I did in Fire Beyond the Darkness.

AI & The Future Of Civilization

A Conversation With Stephen Wolfram 

Home.

Finished Fire Beyond the Darkness. Now beginning my first fiction, a New Zealand historical novel called The Bolthole.