Quantcast
Channel: Mark Changizi's blog
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 30 View Live

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

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 Article



Eye 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 Article

Four 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 Article

Writing 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 Article

Harness 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 Article


Writing 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 Article

Avant-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 Article

Why 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 Article


How 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 Article


Why 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 Article

Wanted: 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 Article

Harnessed: 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 Article

The 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 Article


The 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 Article

Why 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 Article


Why 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 Article

The 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 Article


Can 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 Article

Why 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 Article

Why 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 Article

Seeing 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 Article


The 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 Article


Blue 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 Article

Singularity 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 Article

3-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 Article


The 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 Article

Welcome 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 Article

Don’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 Article

The 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 Article



Is 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...

View Article
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 30 View Live




Latest Images