Socrates went around Athens talking with people and making them think about their life, their values and their actions.

Even though the talk sometimes gets technical, it never gets so much so that you can’t follow; in any case, the Google people are more interested in Assange’s motivation than his technical abilities.

While calling market tops is notoriously hard, perhaps we can look to the great philosophers for wisdom on how the markets might behave

f all our inner lives are so hidden, how on earth can we make predictions about human behavioral patterns and ones that are going to affect the market?

Regardless of the results of this experiment the reminder of our relative ignorance will spark research interest in the physics and the psychology of time."

On March 28, 1786, America’s new Congress of the Confederation received word from John Adams and Thomas Jefferson of their meeting in France with Tripoli’s ambassador regarding Muslim Barbary pirates raiding American ships in the Mediterranean.

Congress directed Jefferson and Adams to borrow $80,000 from Dutch bankers to pay tribute, as Jefferson wrote to John Jay, 1787

The night before the battle, Jones and a Cossack sailor silently rowed out to scout the position of the Turkish fleet. On the side of one Turkish ship, Jones chalked in giant letters: “To be burned. Paul Jones.” In the next day’s battle, that ship was among those destroyed by Jones

For a civilization that boasts considerable sophistication in most areas, to assume that politics and religion constitute two separate realms or that the two can be separated is uncharacteristically naïve.

The second reason and perhaps the most important reason why religion will always play a role in crucial issues is the important role that religion plays in identity formation

Death and religion, according to IDEO Chief Creative Officer Paul Bennett, are among the last frontiers for "good design." Rooted in ritual, comfort, rules and fear, synagogues, churches and funeral homes have yet to be subjected to disruptive innovation.

The company is best known for designing the first laptop comput

er, the stand-up toothpaste tube and the first Apple mouse. It is now working on redesigning the way millennials are "doing Jew

Myanmar has been rocked by several deadly outbreaks of religious violence in recent years, mainly targeting the Muslim minority.

Vernon is the author of Hot Feminist, in which she argues that wanting to look attractive and thin is perfectly compatible with feminist thinking. The book has not been universally welcomed.

Vernon also claimed to have received death threats after writing that she enjoyed being thin.

But Vernon defended her position, saying that caring about fashion and weight is not anti-feminist, and women should not have to choose between “shoes or news”.

But it has also reduced Muslim women to a stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.

they had become such symbols of oppression in the West. But we were confusing veiling with a lack of agency. What most of us didn’t know is that 30 years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek described the burqa as “portable seclusion” and noted that many women saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled them to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. People all over the globe, including Americans, wear the appropriate form of dress for their socially shared standards, religious beliefs and moral ideals.

Ultimately, saving Muslim women allows us to ignore the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated and creates a polarization that places feminism only on the side of the West.

nder the umbrella of Shiite solidarity, Iran provides military aid and funds industrial projects, madrasas, mosques and hospitals. And its leaders have become more vocal about their aims, with President Hassan Rouhani proclaiming himself protector of Iraq’s holy cities.

The most extensive patronage efforts, however, were made by the Ottomans. From the reign of Abdul Hamid II in the 19th century, the Ottomans used their self-professed status as the defenders of global Islam to advance their influence into rival empires, from French North Africa to British India.

The politics of religion undermined the Westphalian order, based on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. At the same time, these policies subverted states, fueled divisions within them — and often ended in violence.

Mooney uses two studies to argue that conservative religious belief can trigger climate change denial — namely, a chart created by Josh Rosenau of the National Center for Science Education and new study conducted by David Konisky and Matthew Arbuckle of Georgetown and the University of Cincinnati, respectively.

Although the exact definition of “conservative religious beliefs” is actively debated among religion scholars, these attributes fall squarely under Mooney’s own definition of church-going conservatives.

Perhaps most importantly for lawmakers, the survey also found that majorities of all major American religious groups — including 82 percent of Jewish Americans, 76 percent of black Protestants, and 69 percent of Hispanic Catholics — agreed that dealing with climate change now will help prevent future economic problems.

e inaction of the international community over the persecution of more than one million Rohingya Muslims by the state and non-state actors of Buddhist majority country Myanmar has once more cast some serious doubts over its ability as well as commitment to resolve world conflicts.

Other than the mere lip service and hollow words of Southeast Asian countries in a regional conference on the boat people crisis held in Bangkok on Friday May 29, nothing substantial and concrete has been done to stop the persecution of the poor Rohingya Muslims or to rescue the boat people.

. As the Millennium Development Goals show, when we get our act together and start to behave like a single species on a single planet, we make progress.

We need to give governments and corporations a new dual mandate that requires them to work for their own populations and the whole of humanity, for their territory and the whole planet.

If we listen carefully, we may hear a word from God for our times. But it won’t be easy. Or comfortable.

t’s easier to identify sexual sins than economic. Industrious thrift is a virtue, but exploitation lurks at the edges. Going through the motions of religion gives false security. It’s easy to rationalize the status quo. It takes a prophet to speak uncomfortable truth.

As superheroes become a bigger part of popular culture – and culture, period – however, geeks have taken their arguments to higher levels as they ponder the morality of superhero movies and their favorite characters’ responsibilities to civilians and property in their fictional universes.

A trailer for the “Man of Steel” sequel, “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice,” indicates that much of the plot will focus on the aftermath of the cataclysmic events of the first movie.

Meanwhile, it is hoped that millions of people of "faith and moral belief" from across the world will have signed up to an e-petition, ourvoices.net, which urges the world's political leaders to act boldly on climate change, both in New York and at next year's "make-or-break" session in Paris.

That is certainly an opinion to which she is entitled as a concerned global citizen, but it is not clear how her job as executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change entitles her to lobby for the virtual destruction of a sector of the world economy which, whatever its misdeeds, will have a part to play in any rational approach to the planet's future.

Stilll, the good news is that there has apparently been learning on both sides

But “Curvology”, a new book by David Bainbridge, focuses on the part played by evolution in men’s—and women’s—understanding and appreciation of the undulations of the female form. Men’s and women’s bodies differ more than is necessary simply to gestate, bear and nourish children

Humans are uneasy with the idea that they have overcome so few of their baser urges and that appearance matters so much, argues Mr Bainbridge. But these urges have existed for as long as people have desired each other enough to want to have sex.

One group in particular is suffering (see article). Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century.

The two-parent family, still the norm among the elite, is vanishing among the poor.

Policymakers also need to lend a hand, because foolish laws are making the problem worse. America reduces the supply of marriageable men by locking up millions of young males for non-violent offences and then making it hard for them to find work when they get out (in Georgia, for example, felons are barred from feeding pigs, fighting fires or working in funeral homes).

God is not only dead, author avers. He never lived. Not to mention the deaths of kids treated with faith instead of science-based medicine.

Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us. This is the dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains.

They’re incompatible first of all, because they both compete to find truths about the universe. There are some fundamental truths about the universe that believers have to accept in order to be religious.