by Beth Ann Bovino A sailing trip touring the Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea began with a gift from family. The skipper, a Slovenian man, brought out a 2 liter soda bottle to celebrate our sail, saying “it was made by his cousin”. The label and color of the drink seemed like we were…

by Alan Koenig Two prominent Liberal hawks recently celebrated the arrival of Bernard Kouchner as French Foreign Minister, for here was a heroic humanitarian, the founder of the noble Doctors Without Borders, a tireless champion of the oppressed, who has risen to command the foreign policy of a nation that cravenly opposed the Iraq War.…

Confusion reigns in many popular discussions of evolution, and 3QD is not immune. I was inspired to write this Monday Musing today at least in part by a comment left by Ghostman on a post about autism a few days ago. In it, among other things, he theorizes that: …autism, far from a brain disorder…

The Qyzyk Nomads Justin. E. H. Smith It was not much in the way of pillow talk, but after a night like the one we’d just spent, nothing could surprise me.  “Do you want to hear a folk tale?” Tanya asked. “I  heard it when I was running a polyclinic in Nebit-Dag a few years…

Look, no matter whether you are religious or an atheist or some other thing, no matter what you believe, I expect you’ll agree with me about the importance of this question: why do so many people believe the wrong thing? The reason I can be fairly sure that this is a question which has deep…

Even now, many people who hear these terms daily on the news are confused about what the real differences are between Sunni and Shia Muslims, so I, having been brought up in a very devout Shia household in Pakistan, thought I would explain these things, at least in rough terms. Here goes: It all started…

by Beth Ann Bovino [For information about 3QD and what we are all about, click here, or here for our main page. Also, after appearing on 3QD, this story was picked up by several news organzations, and even the FBI commented on it. For example, see this from the front page of the NY Daily…

Two years ago we at 3QD as well as Richard Dawkins independently decided to celebrate December 25th as Newton’s Day (it is Sir Isaac’s birthday). You can see my post from last year here. So here we are again. This year I will just provide two interesting things related to Newton, who some argue was…

Like most people, I have no special gift for math. This doesn’t mean, however, that I am mathematically illiterate, or innumerate, to use the term popularized by John Allen Paulos. On the contrary, I know high school level math very well, and am fairly competent at some types of more advanced math. I do have…

It is a frequently observed phenomenon that the less educated and intelligent people are, the more they tend to have decisive and strong opinions on the most complex political, philosophical, economic, and other pressing issues. You know the kind of person I am talking about, the one who is eager to quickly diagnose and solve…

Today 3 Quarks Daily is exclusively devoted to original reflections on the attacks of exactly five years ago. We thank all our contributors. Their various pieces are listed alphabetically below by author’s last name (and linked) for your browsing convenience: Eating Our Popcorn While We Weep, by Karen Ballentine Brief Reflections on 9/11, by Akeel…

Five years seems like such a long time ago. Among other things, both my parents were still alive. (Neither is now.) I was not yet married. I had never heard of blogs. I had never been to Finland (a regular destination for me in recent years because of my friend Marko). I had never been…

Eqbal Ahmad was a shining example of what a true internationalist should be. Eqbal was at home in the history of all the world’s great civilizations. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of states past and present, and he knew that states had a rightful role to play. But he also knew that states existed to…

Asad Raza has written an excellent commentary here at 3QD today on the Zidane headbutt incident at the World Cup final, and I just want to add my two cents now. We still don’t know exactly what Marco Materazzi said (and did) to Zidane to make him lose his trademark cool, but out of the…

by Mark Blyth “You got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Kenny Rogers may seem an unlikely choice for the post of Democratic party strategist, but the advice of ‘the Gambler’ may in fact be the single best strategy that…

It is a warm, languorous, late-spring day here in New York, and I don’t feel like thinking about anything complicated. So, I’m just going to tell you a cat story today. A couple of months ago, my wife Margit’s friend Bailey asked us to look after her cat (really just a kitten) while she was…

Part III: How Brains Might Work, Continued… In Part I of this twice-extended column, I tried to explain how it is that very complex machines such as computers (like the Palm Pilot) are designed and built by using a hierarchy of concepts and vocabularies. I then used this idea to segue into how attempts to…

Part II: How Brains Might Work Two weeks ago I wrote the first part of this column in which I made an attempt to explain how it is that we are able to design very complex machines like computers: we do it by employing a hierarchy of concepts, each layer of which builds upon the…

Today I would like to explain something scientists know well: how computers work, and then use some of the conceptual insights from that discussion to present an interesting recent model of something relatively unknown: how human brains might work. (This model is due to Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the Palm Pilot–a type of computer,…

My father, whom I called Bhayya, grew up in the early part of the last century in the city of Lucknow in northern India. This intersection of period and place was perhaps the acme of Urdu-speaking culture, known ever since all over the subcontinent not only for its sublime literary achievements and the refinement of…