“Conjoined twins with shared brains can pass sensory information to one another”
It will be interesting to see how this develops over time.
Archive of posts filed under the Systems category.
Includes stuff about anything where feedback causes the system to adapt, including the systems of nature, those that are man-made or cultural, and those of the human mind.
“Robotic privacy curtain moves across window to block snoops”
Though a failure on the privacy front, this video is amusing to watch. Does anything strike you as odd about the movements of the curtain? Probably not, because we’re all habituated to computer-based automation and its limitations. But if it were controlled by a human, it would act quite different, anticipating the movements of the …
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“The Many Reasons We Procrastinate, Including the Multiple Selves”
I found this to be an interesting article, but the essay that it links to fascinates me. Partly for the content, but even more for the erroneous thoughts it contains. For example: […] procrastinators know all too well the allures of the salient present, and they want to resist them. They just don’t. That’s not …
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“Detect Liars by Making Them Draw”
I suspect that this is only good when the suspected person doesn’t know to expect it, and how it’s judged. When he does, he’ll have worked out how to draw the visual details along with the rest of his story. Of course, I could be wrong, he might still give himself away.
“Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones”
To think that for my entire life, I thought “weird” was an actual word. Now I find out that it’s an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. 😉 All joking aside, this is some really interesting psychology stuff.
Intelligence
I was somewhat surprised when I read that people are getting more intelligent, on average, every decade. (Here’s more evidence of it.) But it makes sense… no matter what the cause, more people are learning how to think better all the time. And more people believe they can be smarter, from seeing smarter people around …
Project M, and Date Handling
First, for those of you who know and care about it: after seven years of work, the theory for Project X is successfully finished! (Hurray!) However, I haven’t found a simple — but not too simple — use for it so I could prove that it works. I’m not sure I’ll be able to commercialize …
“Gargling with Salt Water Actually Helps a Cold or Cough”
Many old wives’ tales actually do have a basis in fact, and it’s not a good idea to dismiss them out of hand. For instance, it’s easy to dismiss your grandmother’s warning that you’ll catch a cold if you go out without a coat when it’s cold. The cold is caused by a virus, and …
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“How to record the cops”
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This isn’t a perfect society, by a long shot, so those who have authority must be held accountable for exercising that authority responsibly. And the best way to do that is to give everyone — especially their superiors and the courts — the ability to see their behavior first-hand. If they …
“‘Is this science, or literature?'”
If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you probably know my stance on global warming. Or rather, my former stance: I wasn’t precisely a skeptic, but I wasn’t convinced, because the evidence that was being put forth smelled fishier than a tuna trawler. As it turns out, my doubts were well-founded, but wrong. …