For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.

The reason is that in a group, individual errors on either side of the true figure cancel each other out.

Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.

What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one's hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe's creation and did not blink?

We're all talking about the same thing, whether it's religious people or New Age spiritual people or Buddhists or scientists. We're all talking about having a sense of awe and wonder at something grander than ourselves.

In comparison, Google is brilliant because it uses an algorithm that ranks Web pages by the number of links to them, with those links themselves valued by the number of links to their page of origin.

Plato wove historical fact into literary myth.