One of my favorite head trips is considering whether our reality is actually a control system of some kind. Quite a few people much smarter than me have theorized about the physics of this idea, that the entire universe may be made of information, of bits. Some physicists go as far as suggesting that the universe isn't like a computer, but rather it is a computer. One such person is Vlatko Vedral, a professor of quantum information science at Oxford University.
We humans tend to think of communication as solely about formal language—preferably spoken. Instead, animals use things like movement, posture and even pee—as well as sounds—to share concepts like, "I want to play," or messages like, "There's food over here." As long it makes sense, communication has happened.
Nerves in the beaks of birds may not only serve as a "sixth sense" compass but are also magnetometers capable of measuring the intensity and inclination of the Earth's magnetic field. Researchers at the Goethe University Frankfurt previously studied iron-containing nerve branches in the beaks of homing pigeons.
If we accept the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the universe doesn't know it's being watched; it's just that when you make a measurement, you find out more about which branch of the universe you are in. When you measure particle A, you know something about particle B, not because your measurement changed anything other than your state of knowledge.
75% of the participants didn't notice that the experimenter who bent under a counter was replaced by a different person.
"Cranks are noble," Peirce says, "because cranks are independent. A charlatan is a crank who sells out." It's like the difference between kitsch and dreck--people who make kitsch are sincere. Cynical purveyors of political and cultural dreck like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh know better--they're in it for the money and the power and the fame.
The Science of Scams is a new project from Channel 4 and mentalist/magician Derren Brown that aims to debunk the paranormal industry's lucrative claims about ghosts, fortune-telling, telekinesis and other assorted woo woo. Brown and C4 produced seven videos purporting to show the kind of "paranormal" activity held up as evidence of the supernatural and released them on YouTube for several weeks, allowing people to make what they will of them.
Roboticists at the recent International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence discussed the frustrating lack of a common operating system among today's robots.
Norman Doidge's 2006 book The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science was rightly celebrated on its initial release, and remains fascinating today. It's a chronicle of the checkered history of the theory of lifelong brain plasticity, an on-again/off-again theory that the brain's deepest, most specialized structures can be rewired to accomplish new tasks and to view the world in new ways, all through our lives.
There's actually two different words we can play with here. "Hylozoism" is the doctrine that everything is alive, while "Panpsychism" is the belief that everything is conscious. These are close in meaning but not quite identical, although I'm comfortable with believing both.
Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century is one of those popular science books that leaves you feeling a lot smarter after you finish it. Specifically, it makes you feel smart enough to feel kind of dumb and humble -- to feel like your received wisdom about the world and your place in it needs to be rethought.
An intense optical illusion.
In this six-part video, Richard "God Delusion" Dawkins interviews stage hypnotist/magician Derren Brown about the techniques used by "psychics" to fool people (and maybe themselves) into thinking that they have extrasensory powers.
The New Scientist has the skinny on the latest salvo in the war on Darwin: a resurrection of Cartesian dualism, with the idea that the brain is a physical object, but the mind that inhabits it is made from some kind of ghostly jesusite-235 that conclusively proves the existence of the Invisible Sky Daddy in a white robe and beard:.
John Grant's handsome little hardcover book "Corrupted Science: Fraud, Ideology, and Politics in Science," is an eye-popping tour through the history of bad (very, very bad) science, from eugenics to geocentrism to Lysenkoism. Grant -- whose stern historical tone is liberally relieved with bravura dry sarcasm -- approaches his topic from the general to the specific.
Olympic logo police workers are tasked with vigilantly going around all facilities and putting masking tape over the logos for any product where the company is not an official sponsor.
This wonderful photo from the mid-1970s depicts a young man named John Shepherd who "established this UFO-detecting station in his grandparent’s home… His equipment includes radar, sonar, scanners, and homing devices which attempt to track the 'Aliens' he believes are studying the earth."
It may be fun, but this is no comedy, it’s more like a documentary. Cults thrive on our vulnerabilities, and a good demonstration of just how vulnerable we all are was given in a series of experiments conducted by social psychologist Solomon Asch in the 1950s.
History of life is a history of replicators. Language is a parasite we've adapted to. It may have started out being harmful, but we've developed a symbiotic relationship with it.
I've just finished Derren Brown's absolutely charming and fascinating book "Tricks of the Mind," which is one of those impossible- to- pigeonhole, eclectic nonfiction books that pulls together its subject matter in a genuinely novel way and ends up influencing how you see the world around you.
Yet logically the world could be an information simulation running on a multi-dimensional space-time screen. Indeed, if the essence of the universe is information, matter, charge, energy and movement could be aspects of information, and the many conservation laws could be a single law of information conservation.
Today's "60-Second Science" podcast at Scientific American lists the "six basic rules of persuasion".
God's Mechanics is a relgionist's explanation of his faith, in terms aimed at showing techies how one of their own can simultaneously believe in supernatural phenomena and practice rigorous, materialistic science.
