Water world larger than Earth

The Shoe Fits, but the Footprint is Larger than Earth

In their Perspective in this issue of PLOS Biology, Blomqvist et al. [1] set out to demonstrate that ‘‘Ecological Footprint measurements, as currently constructed, are so misleading as to preclude their use in any serious science or policy context.’’ Should the reader be confident in this assessment or are Ecological Footprint methods and results adequate to guide sustainability policy? Their P...

"A Rationality Larger Than The Material Universe"

Is an ant larger than a lion?

In order to examine the influence exerted by an irrelevant semantic variable in a comparative judgment task, we employed a Stroop-like paradigm. The stimuli were pairs of animal names that were different in their physical and semantic sizes (e.g., ant lion). Participants were asked to judge which of the two words was larger either in physical or in semantic size. Size congruity effect (i.e., fa...

Computing Requires Larger Formulas than Approximating

A de Morgan formula over Boolean variables x1, . . . , xn is a binary tree whose internal nodes are marked with AND or OR gates and whose leaves are marked with variables or their negation. We define the size of the formula as the number of leaves in it. Proving that some explicit function (in P or NP) requires large formula is a central open question in computational complexity. While we belie...

World Religions, the Earth Charter,

This article argues the global environmental crisis shows the need for a broad, inclusive definition of sustainability. It shows how religious traditions can help contribute to broader definitions, and describes how work from the field of Religion and Ecology has developed resources. It argues that the next step for the study of Religion and Ecology is to address sustainability, and then propos...