The
I Ching originated in China as a divination manual more than three thousand years ago. In 136 BCE the emperor declared it a Confucian classic, and in the centuries that followed, this work had a profound influence on the philosophy, religion, art, literature, politics, science, technology, and medicine of various cultures throughout East Asia. Jesuit missionaries brought knowledge of the
I Ching to Europe in the seventeenth century, and the American counterculture embraced it in the 1960s. Here Richard Smith tells the extraordinary story of how this cryptic and once obscure book became one of the most widely read and extensively analyzed texts in all of world literature.
Do you feel lucky? A biologist explains we exist because of A Series of Fortunate Events
Sean B. Carroll argues that understanding the randomness of the geological and chemical processes that gave rise to life as we know it can be perspective-changing
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CBC Radio ·
Posted: Dec 18, 2020 1:39 PM ET | Last Updated: December 18, 2020
Biologist Sean B. Carroll argues in his new book that we are only here due to pure chance. In fact, he says there were 70 trillion possible ways your parents could have genetically shuffled their chromosomes to make you unique.(Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
January 1, 2021 Dated Predictions
Predictions Scorecard, 2021 January 01
On January 1
st, 2018, I made predictions about self driving cars, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, and about progress in the space industry. Those predictions had dates attached to them for 32 years up through January 1
st, 2050.
I made my predictions because at the time I saw an immense amount of hype about these three topics, and the general press and public drawing conclusions about all sorts of things they feared (e.g., truck driving jobs about to disappear, all manual labor of humans about to disappear) or desired (e.g., safe roads about to come into existence, a safe haven for humans on Mars about to start developing) being imminent. My predictions, with dates attached to them, were meant to slow down those expectations, and inject some reality into what I saw as irrational exuberance.
On December 8,
Boston Review and Harvard Book Store co-hosted a conversation on the Green New Deal and other strategies for dealing with the existential threat posed by climate change. The participants including Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey knew we would have a new President on January 20. They did not know that we would also have a new Senate. Early in the conversation, Senator Markey declared that he was more optimistic than ever before. The other participants shared Markey’s optimism. With the Georgia results in, that optimism can only grow. So read what the participants have to say about how to address the threat of climate change, and get to work.
Common calendar, Packet papers, January 8
Common calendar, Packet papers, January 8
Ongoing
While decorating for the holidays is a tradition, too often strings of burnt out or damaged holiday lights end up being tossed out with household garbage.
There is a greener way to properly dispose of these decorations. Instead of discarding non-working lights in the trash, the Burlington County Board of Chosen Freeholders want residents to give them a second life by bringing them to the county’s Resource Recovery Complex, where a permanent electronics disposal center is staffed from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. weekdays and from 7-11:30 a.m. Saturdays.