Friday, June 21, 2024

The other shoe is about to drop in 2024 - important closure moments in the state of the world.

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I want to pass on a clip (to which I have added some definitions in parentheses) from Venkatest Rao’s most recent Ribbonfarm Studio installm...
Wednesday, June 19, 2024

Managing the human herd

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 This post is a dyspeptic random walk through thoughts triggered by the front page photograph of the Wall Street journal of June 17, 202...
Monday, June 17, 2024

Empty innovation: What are we even doing?

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I came across an interesting commentary by "Tante" on innovation, invention, and progress (or the lack thereof) in the constant ...
Friday, June 14, 2024

The future of life.

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I want to pass on this science magazine review of Jamie Metzl's new book "Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revo...
Wednesday, June 12, 2024

The pathologies of the educated elites

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Another really nice opinion piece from David Brooks , who notes the consequences, as we have moved from the industrial age to the informatio...
Monday, June 10, 2024

Protecting scientific integrity in an age of generative AI

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I want to pass on the full text of an editorial by Blau et al in PNAS , the link points to the more complete open source online version cont...
Friday, June 07, 2024

Is it a fact? The epistemic force of language in news headlines.

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From Chuey et al. in PNAS (open source):   Significance Headlines are an influential source of information, especially because people oft...
Wednesday, June 05, 2024

Impact of our built environment on our microbiome and health

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Bosch et al. do a perspective in PNAS (open source) pointing out that: ...contemporary built environments are steadily reducing the microbi...
Monday, May 27, 2024

Ancient origins of aspects of instrumental and song melodies distinctive from those of language.

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 A global collaboration from many cultures shows that songs and instrumental melodies are slower and higher and use more stable pitches than...
Friday, May 24, 2024

Think AI Can Perceive Emotion? Think Again.

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Numerous MindBlog posts have presented the work and writing of Elizabeth Feldman Barrett (enter Barrett in the search box in the right colum...
Wednesday, May 22, 2024

The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right

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 I want to pass on a few clips from a recent Thomas Edsall essay , followed by a condensed version of the longer piece provided by Chat GPT ...
Monday, May 20, 2024

Age of Revolutions

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I've finished reading through Fareed Zakaria’s recent magisterial book: “Age of Revolutions Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Pres...
Friday, May 17, 2024

Evolutionarily conserved neural responses to affective touch transcend consciousness and change with age

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Interesting work from Charbonneau et al. in macaque monkeys on the affective (gentle, pleasant) touch pathways that in humans use a differe...
Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Collective behavior from surprise minimization

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A fascinating model for collective behavior from Heins et al .: Significance We introduce a model of collective behavior, proposing that in...
Monday, May 13, 2024

How the US is destroying young people's future.

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When I wake up in the morning, I frequently remind myself to be grateful for the luck of having been born in 1942, and being able to ride th...
Friday, May 10, 2024

Blueprint - Nicholas Christakis on the evolutionary origins of a good society

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This opinion piece by Frank Bruni in the NYTimes motivated me to download and read Nicholas Christakis' Magnum Opus “Blueprint” (very...
Wednesday, May 08, 2024

Another Big History - why the West is WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic)

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Alas, I usually end up reading reviews of books rather than the books themselves. Here I want to pass on clips from Shulevitz's review i...
Monday, May 06, 2024

Are we the cows of the future?

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One of the questions posed by Yuval Harari in his writing on our possible futures is "What are we to do with all these humans who are...
Friday, May 03, 2024

Can there be scientific criteria for what is moral behavior?

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I want to pass on an essay by Sam Harris updating his 2011 book "The  Moral Landscape."   I'm doing this mainly so that I can...