2016 Winter Reality Bites
Black Hole: The Injustice of Wrongful Incarceration Doesn’t End When the Prison Doors Open
Danny Brown was in prison for almost two decades for a rape and murder he didn’t commit, and he has evidence to prove it: a host of eyewitness accounts validating his alibi, a polygraph test he took, and passed, at the prosecution’s request, and DNA from the crime scene matching that of another man who […]
Mind Tricks: Bishop Berkeley and the Idea of Everything
In Berkeley’s conception, it isn’t just the sound of the falling tree that requires a perceiver in order to be realized; without a perceiver, the tree itself does not exist. Nothing does.
Editor’s Note
Reflections on a surreal season. Every weekday, the dog and I head up a very steep hill for a compulsory early morning walk, an essential daily ritual for wearing out a highly energetic adolescent canine and fending off decrepitude in his older human companion. At the top of the hill, we turn right and get […]
Pierced in St. Petersburg
One of the best things about our deceptively drab, Soviet-style building on the western edge of Vasilievsky Ostrov was that it was filled with artists. There were at least seven floors of actors, puppeteers, set designers, acrobats, dancers, and musicians, and we were all training at the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in Saint […]
Paint by Numbers: Algorithms for the Artistically Challenged
As a 10-year-old growing up in Shanghai, Jun-Yan Zhu often avoided homework with furtive doodling. He’d sketch comics or movie characters in pencil, then erase the evidence before his mother saw it. Much as he loved drawing, however, he wasn’t very good at it. He dreamed of a world where everyone, even those who lacked […]
Deep Down: Geologists Discover New Feature of the Cascadia Subduction Zone
To understand what’s happening on the surface of things, you must look deep within. That might be the guiding mantra of a trio of UC Berkeley geologists who are looking a hundred miles below the earth’s surface in order to better understand the tectonic forces that shape our planet. Using a 3D imaging technique called […]