It’s Saturday night. I could be drinking now. I should be drinking now; a friend of mine has been liberated from his wife and larva for the weekend— a greater cause for celebration than he’ll admit publicly— and I should be out there helping him kill brain cells. And yet I have chosen to stay […]
PRISMs, Gom Jabbars, and Consciousness
Category: Dumbspeech, evolution, just putting it out there..., sentience/cognition“And God and the Economy
Have Blessed Me with Equality”
Category: ass-hamsters, evolution, just putting it out there..., neuro, sociobiology
A couple of papers on the nature of religious belief came down the pike last week. One was high-tech, analytically complex, and neurological. The other was low-tech, analytically naïve, and all evo-psych handwavey. It also claimed to rebut the whole school of thought embodied in the first paper, although I don’t think it did— yet […]
The Return of the Pimp.
Category: ink on artYou may remember my hearty endorsement of David Nickle‘s short-story collection, Monstrous Affections, a while back. You may have dismissed that praise as reflexive pimpage on behalf of a friend (you can tell Dave’s my friend because no character with his name has ever appeared in any of my novels only to be brutally crushed […]
Zounds! It’s Christfucking Blasphemy Day!
Category: ass-hamstersAnd, decompressing after my bounce dive to Germany, I almost slept through it. Thanks to Keippernicus and a half-dozen science blogs for bringing me up to speed. Blasphemy Day (“…because your god is a joke”) exists as part of “…a movement to dismantle the wall which exists between religion and criticism.”, to “open up all […]
Apparently, Octoberfest Actually Starts in September…
Category: misc, On the RoadBack in Frankfurt for a couple of days (no, don’t get your hopes up— I’m not), and am too wiped after the flight to either check my rss feeds or venture out into my temporary neighborhood. So here instead are some pictures from my permanant one: That last picture is courtesy of one Emma Sweet […]
Physician, Heal Thyself.
Category: biotech, neuroI was going to devote today’s crawl to a recent study purporting to cast doubts on Libet’s notorious “no free-will” paper from the eighties— kinda pointless attacking that old study when more rigorous and recent studies have been so much more compelling on the same subject, and besides free will isn’t the same thing as […]
Finally, A Cause That Athiests And Creationists Can Get Behind
Category: ass-hamsters, miscPost-Rapture Pet Care. An Atheist idea, I might point out. And they say we have no ethics.
Time Considered as a Helix of Semiprecious Tones: or, an Rx for World Peace
Category: biology, neuroFascinating popsci piece on synaesthesia over at the BBC. It turns out that your common garden-variety hearing-colors/seeing-music synaesthete is only the tip of the iceberg. There are people out there who can literally see time, as a multicolored ribbon winding about them in mid-air. There are folks who perceive letters or numbers as personality types, […]
Sunday on Thursday
Category: art on inkTwo new sketches for you, and one of the fringe benefits of hanging around with professional artists: the brain of Crytek‘s Dan Ghiordanescu parsed the thousands of lines of scribbled alphanumeric code comprising “The Island”, then turned them into the images you see below. (It always blows me away how brains can do things like […]
You Just Can’t Win
Category: miscMy bank — which I chose because of its small size, online nature, and slightly-less-unethical-than-most investment policies — is “shifting its business strategy”. Which is to say, being swallowed alive by another bank. Which institution? Funny you should ask. These guys. I’ve been here before. A few years back I embarked upon a quest to […]