Advanced technological civilisations would be impossible without an Aristotle and the host of haphazard historical circumstance that preserved his thought through the ages. Aristotle was the first real scientist. That's because he assumed that in order to understand the world you must observe it, and that all knowledge comes from...
Blog
What? For a phantom we have suffered?
Herodotus says that the gods had the real Helen whisked away and hidden safely in Egypt, while giving a doppelgänger of hers to Paris. That the Trojans and the Greeks had fought over a ghost. Euripides in his tragedy "Helen" picks ups this version of the story and weaves a...
How markets work
[slideshare id=30185921&sc=no] The first deck I produced by Cypsel, my startup, in May 2013 when we kicked off with recruiting beta testers....
10 Equations that rule your life
[slideshare id=29907472&sc=no] I posted this presentation on SlideShare in order to connect everyday experience and mathematics. My intention was to use curiosity in order to present mathematics as relevant to everyday life. By juxtaposing pictures of people and snapshots of mathematical formulas I aimed to suggest semantic pairs where the...
Gold and shovels
In 1848 James Marshall discovered gold in California. News spread quickly all over the world, about unimaginable riches that grew out of the ground. Historians estimate that around 300,000 people, mostly from the eastern states of US, but also from Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America, travelled to California using...
Perfect day with Lou
It was spring of 1981. I was in love with a blond girl from the all-girls school that was several blocks away from our own, all-boys school, in central Athens. For both of us this was our last year at school. Like our schoolmates we were working hard for the...
Interview with Steven Pinker
Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist. He is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. This is an edited transcript of an interview I took from Steven on April 2004 in Tucson, AZ, during the World Conference on Consciousness....
A short film about austerity Greece
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2d8BSxDepw] Garbage Alchemists describes the life of four creative designers, architects and sculptors in Thessaloniki, Greece who formed a company called "Scoopa". They dig into garbage and pick things that they transform("upcycle") into designer objects. The film was written and researched by George Zarkadakis and directed by Kyriakos Bouyouris for...
Syria and the West
As the US prepares to launch an attack in Syria, against the Assad regime which allegedly used chemical weapons against its own citizens, the debate has focused mostly on tactics and ethics rather than strategy. The British parliament decided against joining the Americans principally on the, rather sensible and practical,...
The Venusian
In the neighbourhood where I grew up there lived an old man we used to make fun of. His name was Vangelis. Barba-Vangelis[1] was the kind, tender type of fellow who did not mind very much when a ball came crashing through his window or when a can of red...