Born With Half A Brain, She Has Compensated

"Michelle Mack has turned medical thinking upside down.

Born with only half a brain, Mack can speak normally, graduated from high school and has an uncanny knack for dates. . . .

G.K. Chesterton's Christianity & The Nightmare of The Modern World

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 – 1936) stood 6 feet 4 inches and weighed 290 pounds. During WWI he was asked by a lady why he was in London and not at the front fighting the Hun, to which he replied, "If you go round to the side, you will see that I am." Chesterton once told vegetarian George Bernard Shaw, "To look at you, anyone would think a famine had struck England." Shaw shot back, "To look at you, anyone would think you have caused it".

Confirmed?: Legends of Humans and Near-Humans Walking The Earth

The Old Testament contains references to Nephilim, "giants," who married people and had children. Herodotus, the father of historians, wrote about human cousins, the "Arimaspians," around 450 B.C. They were "strong warriors, good horsemen rich in flocks of cattle and sheep and goats." Legends of hairy wild people, or almases, have been standard fare in the Russian steppes for centuries.

The Martian Inside Your Head

Years ago Reader's Digest published a series of hugely successful articles by J.D. Ratcliff, all beginning with "I am Joe's ____." Fill in the blank: heart, brain, pancreas, etc. The articles explained complicated body organs in simple terms for lay readers. The one on the heart began, "I’m certainly no beauty. I weigh 12 ounces, am red-brown in color, and have an unimpressive shape. I am the dedicated slave of —well, let’s call him Joe. Joe is 45, ruggedly good-looking, has a pretty wife, three children and an excellent job. Joe has made it."

The Apollo of Gaza

You are a fisherman, name of Jouda Ghurab, on the Gaza Strip and earn give or take seven dollars a day selling what you catch with a net. In August 2013 you dive into the waters off the strip, looking for sardines, squid, and bream, when you see something. What you see will turn out to have great international implications and will involve Hamas, charged by Israel as a terrorist group.

Richard Halliburton at Nineteen and for the Rest of His Brief Life

He was the popular icon of an era, the handsome, debonair Princeton man, the admirer of Rupert Brooke and Lord Byron.  He found adventure and exotic lands while others slaved for the dollar.  He fulfilled his dream and his fame spread.  Today, his books are still found in libraries—pages brown and tattered, perhaps—but they remain on shelves.

Ramana Maharshi, The Early Years: Gabriele Ebert's Biography

Carl Sagan was humbled by the vastness of the universe and in his Cosmos series he reminded us repeatedly that the universe is not about us, dust motes dancing for a moment before falling away.  Unlike Sagan, Ramana Maharshi told us that we are here to stay, but not as we think we are. Like Sagan, Ramana saw the human ego as a bit of ephemera but, unlike Sagan, not as something alive. That, Maharshi might have said, is not bad news, but good news.

Real Men, Social Cooperation, and the Gap In Jack London's Thinking

Jack London was a brilliant man, brilliant but uneducated.  Although a fiction writer, his own life had more experience in it than many a  rousing novel.

The Man Who Found Einstein's Brain in Two Mason Jars inside a Cardboard Box

Steven Levy said that he had an almost religious experience when he found it in Wichita, Kansas.

How Your Brain Is Hard-Wired: The Trolley Problem

Here is an old favorite among moral philosophers, a thought experiment that reveals something about human nature. As a thought experiment it is divorced from everyday reality and is designed to illicit the reasons conscious or unconscious as to why people would do certain things. In this case, it is a clever device to make you think in a certain way and to discover your motives for an action. Understand that in a thought experiment you have no other options than those given you. You cannot read into the experiment your own novel twist to solve it, otherwise it would be useless as an intellectual exercise. There are no trick solutions nor any hidden information. Determine what you would do in both illustrations 1 and 2.

Study the two illustrations and think about the consequences of each possible action. Then ask yourself what you would do in each of the two cases. What would be your reason for doing it?

After you are finished, read on.