Today’s theme is missing pieces. We fancy ourselves to be a pretty smart species. But when you get down to the fundamentals, we don’t understand the world very well at all.

We don’t even know how to behave on our first date with a robot.
Our popular culture is obsessed with the Mayan “apocalypse” this year, but archaeologists have proven (again) that we have no idea what that ancient calendar actually says.
We’re on the verge of building robot sex companions, but we don’t know how to treat them.
As for the people who are alive, we don’t know how our minds arise from our brains.
We don’t understand where life came from, but a new mathematical approach might explain it.
Are particles particles? Are they waves? Is there a difference? We don’t know yet.
And of course, there’s still that mystery of the proportions of the entire universe.
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