The brilliant atomic physicist Enrico Fermi was notorious for unnerving PhD candidates during their oral examinations by asking ‘How many piano tuners are there in the city of Chicago?’ The point of the question, besides the psychological effect, was to gauge how well the candidate co

Apparently my blog posts on the historical roots of European dysfunction (see for example the last one, Visualizing Values Mismatch in the European Union) were noticed. I was approached by people who run Euromind and asked to contribute a short article to the edited volume they are pu

Last weekend my wife and I were in Barcelona. It was our fist visit to the lovely capital of Catalonia, and it certainly lived up to its reputation as one of the Grand Cities of Europe. Source: Wikimedia But a visit to Barcelona also makes one think about the European Union, especiall

Lately I’ve been preoccupied with events that happened more than 5 thousand years ago, in a region far, far away. Following a workshop that we ran on coding Egypt for Seshat last September in Oxford (I wrote about these workshops in this blog) I have been reading up on Egyptian

In his book, The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O. Wilson repeated three questions originally posed by Paul Gauguin: Where did we come from? What are we? Where are we going? A question Gauguin did not ask, but which is implied by the other three, is in the title of this post. Where are w

Frank Herbert’s DUNE is probably the most popular science fiction novel ever (over 12 million of copies sold). It has everything – a complex and dynamic main hero, great villains, neat ecology (planetology!), philosophical and religious insights, and (what is particularly

My previous blog discussed the startling idea that war, despite all the blood, death, and suffering it has inflicted on countless humans over the ages, is actually good for something. As the historian and archaeologist Ian Morris argues, war “drove the creation of increasingly effecti

As I wrote in yesterday’s blog, Robert Bellah’s Religion in Human Evolution is a complex book that addresses many roles of religion in human social evolution. One theme that I was particularly interested in was the influence of religious developments on the evolution of human egalitar