And this can be replicated at a slightly different scale using mass transit in sprawled North American cities.

The Province just imposed the biggest property tax increase in Calgary history, and it shows up on your City tax bill. Calgary's increase: 1.2%. Province's increase: 21% this year, nearly 60% in four years. And another big hike is coming next year. It's time for the provincial government to send their own tax bill.

Gotta love Dutch humor. 😂

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.” Suppose I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself. . . I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle—but no dragon. “Where’s the dragon?” you ask. “Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.” You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints. “Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.” Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire. “Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.” You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible. “Good idea, but she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.” . . . Now, what is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.” — Carl Sagan

Hollywood has spent nearly $600 million trying to bring Matt Damon home. Have they considered maybe he just doesn’t want to come back?

Why logic is a necessary standard of critical thinking but not sufficient on its own.

Why is logical reasoning flawed? Miriam Schoenfield traces her relationship with religion as a child to demonstrate how logic, despite giving us the ability to reach conclusions, may not help in directing us towards truth. All logic does, she argues, is points to inconsistencies in our belief system. Tap here to watch her debate with Steve Fuller and Dan Sperber. iai.tv/video/in-the-name-of-…

This was the top of the New York Times last night. The first thing every reader sees the moment they land on the homepage of the most influential news outlet on earth. All three stories about Israel. There is a famous communications scholar named Maxwell McCombs who developed what is now called the "agenda setting theory." His core finding is simple: The press is not very good at telling people what to think. It is extraordinarily good, however, at telling people what to think ABOUT. And what the New York Times has decided you should think about, every single day, multiple times a day, forever and always, is Israel. You cannot saturate the most influential newsroom in the English language with relentless coverage of one small country and then act surprised when the public becomes similarly hyper-fixated with it. The animosity we constantly see is the predictable output of editorial selection, repeated daily, until it becomes the background music of how people think about the Jewish state.

Practicing moral confusion leading to more moral confusion and then broadcasting that moral confusion to the world to generate yet more moral confusion under the guise of journalism. What could possibly go wrong?

In 2010, Andernach, Germany planted 101 varieties of tomatoes in the town center and told everyone to take whatever they wanted. It was so popular that they did it again, adding beans the next year. Over time, they added onions, fruit trees, lettuce, zucchini, berries, and herbs, all free to the public and maintained by the city. Andernach is now nicknamed the "edible city." And they're not alone. Philadelphia has been doing a version of this since 2007. The Philadelphia Orchard Project has helped establish 67 sites across the city with thousands of food-bearing trees. Baltimore is planting fruit trees on sidewalks. Seattle, Boston, San Francisco, and Asheville all have public urban orchards. A mature apple tree produces 400-500 pounds of fruit per year. A mature pear tree can produce for 75 years. Cities pride themselves on their tree cover. We've decided that trees are important, but we haven't fully decided those trees should feed people yet. Would you support urban fruit trees and vegetables in your city?

Here's how you know someone is highly intelligent...

In the 1990s, Canadian ecologist Suzanne Simard made a groundbreaking discovery that challenged everything we thought we knew about how forests work. While studying managed forests in British Columbia, she noticed something puzzling: when birch trees were removed to promote the growth of valuable Douglas firs, the firs did not flourish as expected, they actually struggled and grew more slowly. Determined to understand why, Simard traced the movement of nutrients using radioactive carbon isotopes. What she found was astonishing. Trees were actively sharing resources through vast underground fungal networks known as mycorrhizae. These delicate, thread-like fungi connect the roots of different trees across the forest floor, forming a complex web that allows the exchange of carbon, water, nutrients, and even chemical signals, sometimes between entirely different species. She discovered that older, larger trees often serve as central "hubs" or "mother trees," supporting younger saplings by redistributing vital resources and helping the entire ecosystem remain resilient. When these key trees are removed, the underground network weakens, and the health of the remaining forest declines. Simard’s research overturned the traditional Darwinian view of forests as battlegrounds of ruthless competition. Instead, she revealed a far more sophisticated reality: forests operate as highly cooperative systems where trees communicate, support one another, and even warn neighboring trees about threats like drought, disease, or insect attacks. What appears to the human eye as a silent, still forest is, in truth, a vibrant, interconnected living network, built not on isolation and rivalry, but on deep connection and mutual aid.

It is a disaster because of the SAID Principle: Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand applies to all living things. If the continuous demand is to engage in moral confusion, we will become more morally confused and less capable of regaining our moral footing.

His instincts to enter the water silently with no splashes are amazing, that is fundamental for Jaguars in the wild since they do a large part of their hunting in the water.

I agree with him right up to the point of escalation. Escalation is also low energy and, in no way increases the chances of getting to the truth unless the boss is a great critical thinker. How about developing critical thinking capacities and processes for EVERYONE?

Car dependency is a mandatory tax on your freedom and bank account. True fiscal conservatism is living in a walkable neighborhood where you don’t need a $40,000 depreciating asset just to buy groceries.

The most detailed 3D reconstruction of a cell ever created. Blows my mind every time. But what exactly are we looking at here? The average human cell contains: ~ 15-20 total distinct organelle types, totalling between ~1-10 million working together per cell. All these nano-machines in the cell are made up of proteins. ~ 8,000-10,000 distinct types of unique proteins, adding up to between 40 million - 10 trillion total proteins making up all those cellular systems. ~ 10,000 - 15,000 distinct types of RNA shuttling information around the cell, totalling up to ~10 million RNA molecules moving around the cell simultaneously. ~ Billions of Lipid molecules packed together into the cell membrane, which is also packed tightly with millions more protein-based nano-machines. And let's not forget billions of lines of DNA information to build and run it all. That's TRILLIONS of of individual molecular pieces working together to make a single cell function. That means there is more complexity in a single cell than humanity's largest cities. And people still believe this wasn't Divinely Designed. This is God's Glory on Display. But to make the point. A cell couldn't have evolved from some nebulous simpler "protocell" because even the simplest cells still require massive complexity. The "simplest" cell ever created was engineered by scientists knocking out pieces of a functional cell until it stopped functioning. Here is what they found is the absolute necessary minimal requirements of a cell to function: - Over ~531,000 lines of coded DNA information - 473 total genes to create hundreds of unique protein products (they later added 19 genes back in because the cell was so weak) - Hundreds of thousands of total proteins all working together - Extensive regulatory networks guiding all these interactions If the cell doesn't have all these systems in place, from the start... it doesn't live. Cell rely on an intricate network of complex systems, which are themselves built from complex interconnected pieces woven together into an incomprehensibly complex web of functionilty. Only intelligence has ever been observed creation vast interconnected systems like this. Life was clearly Created. It couldn't happen any other way.

Oh, May. Every year I count down the weeks until your arrival, and then you pass in the blink of an eye. Here’s a look back at the beauty of May through my lens. Please follow my account if you’d like more. No politics, no AI, just countryside beauty. 📍 Peak District, England

So many fallacies of the problem-solving approach here. Of course people who recognize undesirable patterns should tell people who might have an idea about improvement. Most problems are misunderstood to be linear leading to crappy or worse ‘solutions’

“The pursuit of philosophy is founded on the belief that knowledge is good, even if what is known is painful.” — Bertrand Russell