To permit ignorance is to empower it. To do nothing as our leaders proclaim absurdities is a crime of complacency. As is letting our schools and chur… - Dan Brown

To permit ignorance is to empower it.

To permit ignorance is to empower it. To do nothing as our leaders proclaim absurdities is a crime of complacency.

When a computer creates art, who is the artist — the computer or the programmer? At MIT, a recent exhibit of highly accomplished algorithmic art had put an awkward spin on the Harvard humanities course: Is Art What Makes Us Human?

For the human brain,” Edmond explained, “any answer is better than no answer. We feel enormous discomfort when faced with ‘insufficient data,’ and so our brains invent the data — offering us, at the very least, the illusion of order — creating myriad philosophies, mythologies, and religions to reassure us that there is indeed an order and structure to the unseen world.

Every epic collapse, the provost believed, could be traced back to a single moment — a chance meeting, a bad decision, an indiscreet glance.