Autism and Mercury... A recent study funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta claims that thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used for many years in vaccines, is “not associated with problems in speech, intelligence, memory, coordination, attention, or other measures of childhood...

Book Report: Complex Adaptive Systems... I just finished reading Complex Adaptive Systems and thought I’d share some of the stuff I underlined and point out how it relates to certain themes and claims in this blog. The organization of these quotes is my own, not related to the chapter or section headings of the book necessarily....

The Fundamental Theorem of Email... I can count on one hand the number of times my inbox has been empty in my life. If you are like me, your email inbox is the center of your organizational universe. It’s the main “to do” list, and when the emails start piling up unread or unprocessed, it creates anxiety. A whole industry...

Three Kinds of Cooperation... Ecologists speak about two types of cooperation — mutualism and commensalism — which distinguish whether both or just one of a pair is benefiting. I’d like to look at a different dimension of cooperation that has to do with communication. There are at least three different types of...