So. The 2013 Aurora Ballot came out a few days ago. Once again, I hadn’t been paying much attention because I didn’t actually publish anything last year. Once again, I got a phone call telling me that whatever I talked about at last fall’s SpecFic Colloquium got me onto the ballot anyway, under “Best Fan [...]
You’ve probably heard about the rat-brain network by now — it showed up in the popsci threads back at the end of February, provoking breathless comparisons with Vulcan mind melds and The Matrix. And I gotta say, the coverage certainly sucked me in: an actual (albeit rudimentary) network of brains, linked together to solve problems? [...]
(Being an English edit of a column that appeared in Nowa Fantaskyka a few months back) You’ll remember that I recently returned from a trip to Sweden. While I was there, by a curious coincidence, I happened to read a Swedish study from the Public Library of Science: “Lifting the Veil of Morality: Choice Blindness [...]
Back around the turn of the century — when I was old enough to know better, anyway — I answered a knock on the door to find an unfamiliar twentysomething looking up at me with a disarming seal-pup expression on his face. He’d locked himself out of his car, apparently. He needed $20 to pay [...]
For the past few months an image has been itching at the back of my mind, like a piece of grit waiting for a story to accrete around it: a neuron culture in a petri dish, like a rifters head cheese but without any inputs to keep it sparking. We presume that all internal feedback [...]
Some of you may remember my ruminations on the evolutionary significance of sociopathy, my tentative musings that it may be not so much a pathology as an adaptation, and my almost pathetic relief (scroll down to Oct 14) when people with actual credentials wonder the same thing and thus make me look like less of [...]
…being a term generally applied to the entree at South Residence back at the University of Guelph. This time, though, I’m talking about the mysteries of thinking meat, and a couple of thoughts thereupon which have sprung up elsewhere since I got back. The first is over at ChiZine‘s blog, which is currently running a [...]
So DARPA’s feeling a little overwhelmed by the blizzard of data at its disposal. All that telemetry. All those intercepted signals. All those eyes in the sky and ears to the ground, sucking up the terabytes so fast they can barely slap new storage into place in time to catch it all. And that’s just [...]
I’d like to, but am coming down with some kind of sore-throat/stuffed-sinus/flesh-eating-virus thingy, and have decided that I should probably quarantine myself today. If any of you locals are going to be checking it out, though, I’d be grateful for an executive summary.
So just a day or so after we revisit “A Word for Heathens“ — a story exploring the social ramifications of neurotechnology that induces Rapture On Demand — here comes a paper by Cosimo Urgesi and his buddies showing a relationship between the posterior parietal cortex and something called “Self-Transcendence” — an index, if we [...]
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