December 2010
39 posts
Carl Zimmer - Could a Dose of Ether Contain the... →
“Working from this hypothesis, Tononi and his colleagues are trying to develop tools that can monitor levels of consciousness in anesthetized patients. They are also developing software to measure the complexity of the brain’s responses to stimuli. If Tononi’s idea is correct, anesthesiologists may be moving toward being able to gauge consciousness much as doctors gauge a patient’s...
“Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in...”
– Buddha (via ageofreason)
eudaimonia asked: Your first book recommendation is
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
If you've already read it let me know, and I shall send another.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak.
If you've already read it let me know, and I shall send another.
Carl Zimmer - Humanity's Other Basic Instinct:... →
“But once our ancestors began to link their natural instinct for numbers with a new ability to understand symbols, everything changed. Math became a language of ideas, of measurements, and of engineering possibilities. The rest—the skyscrapers and supermarkets and weddings—were just a matter of derivation.”
eudaimonia asked: Look at you with your fancy pictures! Nice! I've only read This Is Your Brain on Music and The Demon Haunted World (but only after your recommendation--I am now in love with Carl Sagan, so thanks!). I read several other music/brain books this year, and one I can recommend is The Music Instinct by Philip Ball. It is heavy on the music theory, though. I haven't read it, but Musicophilia...
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Books in 2010
Looking back over my reading list, it seems I’ve read less this year compared to the past few. But 2010 was a unique year compared to the previous 20. Traveled to New Zealand for three weeks over the summer to visit a friend studying abroad and roam the islands. Then, I left for Amsterdam in August to study abroad for one year. Since arriving, I’ve traveled around the Netherlands,...
Don’t Leave Your Memory At Home | h+ Magazine →
The Experimental Life: An Introduction to Michel... →
“Montaigne is a special philosophical figure because he didn’t subscribe to one school of thought. Instead, he subscribed to all of them. He was willing to take bits and pieces from anywhere, as long as they had practical application to his life. This was why he tirelessly observed and experimented, jotted down useful notes in his commonplace and repeatedly asked “am I sure about...
“People say, ‘I’m going to sleep now,’ as if it were nothing. But it’s really a...”
– George Carlin, Brain Droppings (via aspaceinvader)
The Goal of Neural Enhancement | h+ Magazine →
“What is the ultimate goal of neural enhancement? Its obvious many people want to do it, but why? Does it afford fitness advantages for natural selection? Probably, but if this is the case, then it is no different than enhancing the brain through education. If you get a good education you will be able to behave in ways unavailable to those without an education. Maybe this means you can...
The Hazards of Nerd Supremacy: The Case of... →
“And yet, ideas like object oriented programming were essential to making big programs reliable. The world we know today couldn’t exist if code had stayed as messy as it used to be. Structure is what makes information usable. Making everything totally connected and open to everything destroys structure. This principle works for code, but it is also cosmic.”
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Age of Reason: The Double Life →
ageofreason:
How very simple life would be If only there were two of me A Restless Me to drift and roam A Quiet Me to stay at home. A Searching One to find his fill Of varied skies and newfound thrill While sane and homely things are done By the domestic Other One. And that’s just where the trouble lies; There is a Restless Me that cries For chancy risks and changing scene, For arctic blue and...
Cheating in Computer Science →
“I no longer teach programming by teaching the features of the language and asking the students for original compositions in the language. Instead I give them programs that work and ask them to change their behavior. I give them programs that do not work and ask them to repair them. I give them programs and ask them to decompose them. I give them executables and ask them for source,...
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“I guess you could say my overall point is this: All people are different. All...”
– The Cannabis Closet from Andrew Sullivan’s blog The Daily Dish (featured on the Atlantic). Check out the book for edited compilations or sample some of the original entries.
Homeland Security Presents 'Evidence' For Domain... →
In fact, Agent Reynolds appears to blame Torrent-Finder for anything it finds as a search engine. Anyone at any search engine (or who understands how the internet works) should be horrified by this. It’s like saying that Google is liable for everything and anything that people can find by doing a search on Google. Think about that for a second.
“The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you...”
– Chuck Palahniuk (via noitsprianka)
Getting Over the Code Delusion →
“The one decisive lesson I think we can draw from the work in molecular genetics over the past couple of decades is that life does not progressively contract into a code or any kind of reduced “building block” as we probe its more minute dimensions. Trying to define the chromatin complex, according to geneticists Shiv Grewal and Sarah Elgin, “is like trying to define life itself.””
The Coming Death Shortage - The Atlantic →
“Given that today nobody knows precisely how to engineer major increases in the human lifespan, contemplating these issues may seem premature. Yet so many scientists believe that some of the new research will pay off, and that lifespans will stretch like taffy, that it would be shortsighted not to consider the consequences. And the potential changes are so enormous and hard to grasp that...
“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private...”
– Julian Assange on SNL (via bbbrad)
Powerful Ideas - Scott Adams (Dilbert) →
“Ideas are a lot like viruses. Neither a virus nor an idea is alive, technically, but both reproduce though contact with other people. And both are hard to eradicate.”
“Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant...”
– Hunter S. Thompson (via ageofreason)
Deadly Medicine →
More and more clinical trials for new drugs are being outsourced overseas and conducted by companies for hire. Is oversight even possible?
CSI | Why Is Religion Natural? →
“In a sense, the cognitive study of religion ends up justifying a common intuition, best expressed by Jonathan Swift’s dictum that “you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.” The point of studying this scientifically is to show to what extent we can expect religious notions to be stable and salient in human cultures, not just now but for a long time to come.”
David Nutt: 'The government cannot think logically... →
“Last month Nutt’s new foundation published its first major report in the Lancet, which ranked 20 different drugs according to 16 different harms they do, both to users and to wider society. Alcohol came top, higher than heroin, crack and crystal meth, while ecstasy and LSD were ranked among the least damaging. It was, undeniably, the most comprehensive study of their respective risks ever...
The War on Cameras →
It has never been easier—or more dangerous—to record the police.
“Transparency, information, clarity and interpretation are required for a deep...”
– Dr Cornel West (via savagemike)
The Brain That Changed Everything →
When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison’s skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time — a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry’s brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin.
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The culture of conspiracy, the conspiracy of... →
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“Creativity is not something just for “creatives”—we all have given being to some...”
– Culture Making (via azspot)
Siblings Share Genes, But Rarely Personalities :... →
Sam Harris Believes In God →
“Harris’s true obsession, then, is not God but consciousness, the idea that the human mind can be taught—trained, rationally—to be more loving, more generous, less egocentric than it is in its natural state. And though he knows that he can sound like a person who believes in God, he thinks that God is the wrong word to describe his beliefs.”
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“A three-day-old human embryo is a collection of 150 cells called a blastocyst....”
– Sam Harris, on stem cell research. (via cocknbull)
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“Thought, I love thought.
But not the juggling and twisting of already existent...”
– D.H. Lawrence