A 21st Century Mother and Child

A mother cradling her infant child.

If the better angels of human nature were to prevail, this picture could become one of those pictures — a single frame that captures an essential piece of the 21st century.

Two human beings, stripped way past bare: two brains, connected in a universal human pose, a mother cradling her infant child.

Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist (and my colleague) at MIT, is a maestro of the camera that can make such images, the functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, or fMRI. To create an fMRI portrait, a subject must lie still inside a narrow cylinder, the inside of a giant electromagnet. The artful manipulation of electromagnetic fields catches the brain in the act — not quite the act of thinking, but of working, nerve cells grabbing oxygen to power the action that ultimately adds up to an idea, a gesture, a feeling.

Brumotti, Road Bike Freestyle 2

Not your average roadie ride...

What's in a Watt?

In our modern world with powered devices at our fingertips it's very easy to lose track of just how much civilization depends on power other than and far in excess of human energy.

Smooth Criminal M Jackson

A lot of low information voters supported the Iraq War

It came to me recently that one of the attractions of Hillary Clinton with some voters is that she supported and voted for the same colossal screwup they were for, letting Dubya have his horrific way in Iraq. "Well, you see Hillary Clinton was fooled too and that excuses me being wrong because she is smart and knows foreign policy and she still got it wrong."

Those who were wrong about Iraq greatly resent those who correctly called it, the gloating over getting people to vote for someone who violates their sense of ethics has a lot to do with desire to humiliate anyone who makes the gloaters feel guilty/stupid/naive about Iraq.

"Well you voted for them and you knew they supported the Iraq War which makes you just as dirty/stupid/naive as them, you hypocrites." will be the next stage.

Human beings aren't rational animals, they are animals that rationalize.