No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons (Re-reloaded)

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 [...]

We’ve talked about free will on these screens before. We’ve referred to consciousness as the pointy-haired boss who takes credit for decisions made endless milliseconds before it was even aware of them; tumors that turn people into pedophiles, and do violence to the very concept of “culpability’; military hardware that bypasses conscious thought [...]

A single gene.   A single tweak.  Synapse speed boosted by perhaps a hundred milliseconds, tops.
Transgenic Genius rats.  (PopSci story here.)
Who’da thunk it would be so easy?  And how long before I can get these NR2B boosters in a nasal spray?

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 [...]

Most of you probably know about Turing machines: hypothetical gizmos built of paper punch-tape, read-write heads, and imagination, which can — step by laborious step — emulate the operation of any computer. And some of you may be old enough to remember the Sinclair ZX-80— a sad little personal computer so primitive that [...]