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Disenchanted Subversive opinions and ideas Make me one with everything A call to an outsourced and offshored computer technical support center ends in a trek up a punishing mountain in search of infinite wisdom. Clear as mud This is the last transmission of Alan Gerrard, the first diplomat of Earth to speak to a strange alien race in the only language they understand. 2 + 2 A little boy throws stones into a pond and discovers a principle that may explain how the whole universe comes to exist. Faith in the game What's the difference between knowing something and just knowing the name of it? Some of the rifts that still exist decades after the Scopes Monkey Trial would be healed if only the faithful understood that scientists aren't out to get them, and their methods didn't come from the Devil. Formula for success Four social scientists nurse their pet success theories, then get into a bar fight. A tale of human success stories and the formulas we've invented to explain them. Someone you don't know Spam in the Twilight Zone: how the agents of junk email want pushbutton simplicity like the commodities markets. There ain't nothin' on TV Are we more objective creatures than we seem? Erik Benson suggests that subjective thoughts are nothing more than stale objective thoughts that we didn't want to re-think. A guest essay. Scare tactics The psychological principle behind jail design, the effect of a dummy camera, at work on the battlefield? How the pan-opticon effect may turn war into a factory of diplomatically useful images. Thinking in reverse The night the universe conspired against me, or how to get from the worm to the cheeseburger without solving the order of the chicken-and-the-egg first. Invent this and die Imagine if the Koala invented the airplane, but then landed someplace with no eucalyptus trees. Could man invent something that carries him too far from his ecological niche? Newsfeed display by CaRP