Archive for just putting it out there…

The End of Art

This whole stem-cell breakthrough is certainly worth keeping track of, but not here because you know about it already; it’s all over other sites far more popular than mine. Ditto the hilarious perspective on WoW which serves as the subject of today’s visual aid, starring characters which many of us must know (albeit in roles […]

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The View From The Left

This is an ancient review article — about ten years old, judging by the references — but it contains an intriguing insight from split-brain research that I hadn’t encountered before: The right hemisphere remembers stuff with a minimum of elaboration, pretty much as it happens. The left hemisphere makes shit up. Mr. Right just parses […]

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Do-It-Yourself Zombiehood

New to me, old to the lit: a paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, which came out last November (just a month after Blindsight was released): “Attention and consciousness: two distinct brain processes“. Let me cherry-pick a few choice excerpts: “The close relationship between attention and consciousness has led many scholars to conflate these processes.” […]

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Selfish Bastards, Every One

Now and then I’ve fielded questions — in interviews, private e-mails, maybe even here in the ‘crawl — about my reductionist take on human nature. In particular, a lot of folks are not comfy with my dissing of altruism, which (if it ever does arise in a population) is likely to get weeded out real […]

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Motherhood Issues

How many times have you heard new parents, their eyes bright with happy delerium (or perhaps just lack of sleep), insisting that you don’t know what love is until you first lay eyes on your baby? How many of you have reunited with old university buddies who have grown up and spawned, only to find […]

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How to Build a Zombie Detector

A fair number of topics jostling for attention lately: slime moulds outfitted with skittish cyborg exoskeletons, Jim Munroe’s microbudget megasavvy take on nanotech, even this recent research on free will in fruit flies (which I’m wary of, but am holding off commenting upon until I’ve thoroughly read the original paper). And I’m in bitten-off-more-than-I-can-chew mode […]

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