Hobbits Are Lame
I have yet to be bored watching the 27-and-a-half-hour extended versions of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy with the kids. It is truly an awe-inspiring cinematic masterpiece.There is, however, one...
View ArticleEye Computer: Turning Vision Into A Programmable Computer
Our everyday visual perceptions rely upon unfathomably complex computations carried out by tens of billions of neurons across over half our cortex. In spite of this, it does not “feel” like work to...
View ArticleFour Hurdles For A Scientific Theory Of Music
There’s a good chance that you’re listening to music while reading this, and if you happen not to be, my bet is that you listen to music in the car, or at home, or while jogging. In all likelihood, you...
View ArticleWriting As Superpower
Communicating with the dead is a standard job requirement for a psychic such as the infamous medium John Edward of the television show Crossing Over who claims to be able to listen to what the deceased...
View ArticleHarness The Wild Eye
In Writing As Superpower we discussed that writing is really for the eye, at the expense of the hands, despite the fact that our brains may have evolved to comprehend speech. We still prefer to...
View ArticleWriting That Harnesses The Eye: The Trouble With Speechwriters
In Writing As Superpower I outlined how writing is for the eye, at the expense of the hands, despite the fact that our brains may have evolved to comprehend speech. We still prefer to 'listen' with our...
View ArticleAvant-Garde Science: Toward Unconstrained Scientific Craziness
As I lay inside the box in the pitch blackness waiting for the show to begin, I wonder if the operator forgot to start it. Nothing is happening – no sound, no sights…nothing at all. Ah, wait, did I...
View ArticleWhy Patients Are Safer In The Nude
Note: RPI put out a press release today (4/29/2010) on my work today so I am reposting this with today's date also.read more
View ArticleHow Many Limbs Should Humans Have?
In War of the Worlds, giant alien robots emerge out of the ground and begin vaporizing large numbers of actors. There’s a lot to like in those scenes, but there are three things I could not stand.Like...
View ArticleWhy Do We Have Ten Fingers?
In How Many Limbs Should Humans Have? I described my Limb Law, an empirical law I discovered which relates how long an animal’s limbs are to how many limbs it has. This law is explained by virtue of...
View ArticleWanted: Pain Engineers
Have a talent and enjoyment for inflicting prescribed doses of pain? Your dream job awaits. (Biology undergraduate required.) Contact: 555-8428 …as seen in classified ads.You are not supposed to be...
View ArticleHarnessed: The Reading Instinct
I recently finished the draft for my upcoming book, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (Benbella, 2011). To give you a better idea of it’s aim, here is the...
View ArticleThe Idea-Monger: No Genius Required
You are an idea-monger. Science, art, technology – it doesn’t matter which. What matters is that you’re all about the idea. You live for it. You’re the one who wakes your spouse at 3 AM to describe...
View ArticleThe Ingredients Of A Good Popular Science Book
The hardback of The Vision Revolution has been out for one year, and I couldn’t be happier with the reaction it has received, including reviews in fantastic places like the Wall Street Journal and...
View ArticleWhy We Have Eureka Moments
"My plan for today:1. Pick up dry cleaning.2. Go to dentist.3. Think up brilliant idea.”Good luck with that third bullet. Big ideas can’t be planned like growing tomatoes in one’s garden. We stumble...
View ArticleWhy Do We Cry? Eight Half-Baked Ideas
Crying is a waste of perfectly good water. So why we do it? I have no idea, so I would like to hear your ideas. To get the ball rolling, here are eight hypotheses, each surely inadequate and probably...
View ArticleThe Moving Look Of Music
I believe that music sounds like people, moving. Yes, the idea may sound a bit crazy, but it’s an old idea, much discussed in the 20th century, and going all the way back to the Greeks. There are lots...
View ArticleCan Science Be Justified?
“John is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, John is mortal.” This argument from two premises to the conclusion is a deductive argument. The conclusion logically follows from the premises;...
View ArticleWhy I Just Left Academia
This week a computer science researcher named Vinay Deolalikar claimed to have a proof that P is not equal to NP. Let’s set aside what this means for another day, lest I get distracted. The important...
View ArticleWhy Meanings Must Be Fuzzy
A word is vague if it has borderline cases. Yul Brynner (the lead in "The King and I") is definitely bald, I am (at the time of this writing) definitely not, and there are many people who seem to be...
View ArticleSeeing Through Yourself: The Fundamental Reason For Binocular Vision
There aren’t many cyclopses in nature, and those that exist don’t live up to expectation. They tend to be crustaceans like water fleas and another aptly named “cyclops” (see left photo below) or early...
View ArticleThe Visual Nerd In You Understands Curved Space
You’ve heard that space is curved – that’s gravity. You’ve also been told that you cannot really understand curved space. Sure, you can come to know curvy mathematics by studying general relativity or...
View ArticleBlue Football Fields: Upping The Ante
Boise State University's football team is smoking, and some have wondered whether their blue football field may help explain their success...so much so that, a couple months back, Oregon State painted...
View ArticleSingularity Science Theater 3000: How Reverse-Engineering Postponed...
In the cult television series Mystery Science Theater 3000, we are treated to two aliens and a dude wisecracking their way through terrible old B-movies like Project Moonbase. For example, in their...
View Article3-D Movies Are Missing The Point...Of View
Many of the films we love manage to put us in someone else’s shoes, whether it be the shoes of a social network tycoon or a zombie killer. After all, we don’t pay $15 to see on screen what we do all...
View ArticleThe Web And The Creativity Bust
Imagine, if you will, a Borg cube from Star Trek humming along through space, part of a fleet of such cubes, each with millions of drones participating in a spatially non-localized brain of...
View ArticleWelcome To Humans, Version 3.0
Where are we humans going, as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve like in X-Men, become genetically engineered as in Gattaca, or become cybernetically enhanced like...
View ArticleDon’t Hold Your Breath Waiting For Artificial Brains
I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It's the we're-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It's exuded into the atmosphere from news media plumes ("IBM Aims to...
View ArticleThe Ravenous Color-Blind: New Developments For Color-Deficients
Last year, as our O2Amp technology got into the hands of more and more users (mainly interested in their various medical applications), we began hearing back from many color-blind folk. One of our...
View ArticleIs Your Doctor "Health Blind"?
There are those among us who are “health blind”, i.e., handicapped at sensing the health signals most of us easily recognize on others around us. They are the color blind. But we at O2Amp can fix...
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