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Land use and misuse

I like to think of me more as a digital than an analog guy. But some things are analog and it is very hard, if not impossible, to digitize them. Land is one of these things. Even though Earth is a large planet and there is plenty of land (more precisely 13 billion hectares – […]

Sense and Sensitivity

This quote by the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky, even though old, is still actual and applicable to fight fake news, misinformation, pseudosciences and scientific exclusion. The attractiveness of science to many people lies in that it seems to answer the indestructible yearling for certainty so complete that no thinking mind can evade its acceptance. We […]

Networks of trust

When I was a kid, there was this advertisement on TV. Gerson de Oliveira, the outstanding soccer player from the Brazilian national team that won the ’70 world cup, asked the audience “Do you like to take advantage?” while explaining why they should buy a particular brand of cigarettes. Many years later, the advertisement became notorious. […]

Can you see it?

Once I heard on a radio show a journalist saying that If our brains were simple enough for us to understand it, we wouldn’t be capable of understanding it! Unfortunately I don’t remember the name of the journalist, neither the radio show, nor the context. Not even how old I was. I do remember I […]

First things first

Just recently I came across ‘Maslow’s hierarchy of needs’ in humans, reading ‘the price of tomorrow’ by Jeff Booth. In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) proposed a theory that all humans possess a hierarchy of needs from basic need to self-actualization: some needs were more important than others, and needs on one level must […]