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Author Archives: Strange Loops
Word of the Day: Rumspringa
Rumspringa, n. 1. Literally, “running around” [from Pennsylvania German]. 2. A period when adolescent Amish explore the outside world before making an informed decision to either leave the Amish community (resulting in shunning) or be baptised as a full, adult … Continue reading
Is It Irrational to Play the Lottery?
Short answer: yes, it is irrational. Odds of winning big are less than the ratio of ticket cost to amount won. If $1 has a 1 in 1-billion chance of netting you 500 million dollars, it’s a really bad deal. … Continue reading
Word of the Day: Compersion
Compersion, n. 1. The opposite of jealousy. 2. The positive feelings one gets when a lover is enjoying another relationship. The term compersion originally comes from the polyamory community, where people may have multiple intimate relationships at the same time, … Continue reading
Accepting Impermanence
“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.” –Heraclitus We humans are innately wired to seek out permanence. In our evolutionary past, it was useful … Continue reading
Word of the Day: Praxis
Praxis, n. 1. The process by which a theory or lesson is put into action. 2. The synthesis of action and theory; a dynamic process recognizing a reciprocal relationship between theory and practice. 3. Free, self-conscious, authentic activity practiced by … Continue reading
I Am a Strange Loop
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter has long been one of my favorite books. That book tackles what it means to be conscious and how consciousness or meaning could arise out of unconsious and meaningless elements (i.e. physical particles bouncing … Continue reading
Baby Steps Toward GATTACA
The auto insurance company Allstate has announced a new program to improve driving safety in older drivers. The program, InSight, consists of some computer-based cognitive training programs that are supposed to improve visual processing. In turn, they think that will … Continue reading
The Dangers of Benevolent Sexism
Hostile and Benevolent Sexism Everyone is familiar with hostile sexism: the rude jokes, discrimination, harassment, and explicit opinions of gender inferiority. In general, this attitude is condemned in our society, and laws are in place to at least try to … Continue reading
False Memories
Do you remember where you were when you first saw the closed-circuit TV footage of the 7/7 London bombings in 2005? Hopefully not, else you may be imagining things — no such footage exists. But if you claimed to remember … Continue reading
Social Chameleons
Some people are great at self-monitoring in social situations. They attenuate their behavior based on the social dynamic they are in, engage in impression management, tend to be concerned with the appropriateness of their actions, and adapt well to different … Continue reading
Beneath Normal People Lurk Monsters
Back in 1961, Yale researcher Stanley Milgram performed a now-controversial experiment. He recruited people to volunteer in a psychology study supposedly about learning and memory. When they arrived, they were told the setup: a pair of participants were to play … Continue reading
Security versus Privacy
How would you feel if law enforcement started scanning all of your email, your file transfers, and your web search history that Google and other companies keep (often going back years)? The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Michael McConnell, is … Continue reading
In- and Out-of-Body Experience
Normally our bodies receive sensory input through eyes, ears, skin and other systems, and those inputs synch up in consistent ways, such that our brain can put it together into a coherent picture of the 3D world around and including … Continue reading
Monkey-controlled Robot
Researchers in the U.S. and Japan successfully synched up a monkey’s brain with a robot across the world, and after about an hour of practice the monkey could control the robot’s legs while it walked on a treadmill. First the … Continue reading
Caesar’s Last Breath
Over enough time, molecules released into the air disperse pretty evenly (this is why polluting smoke-stacks are so tall, avoiding local pollution by dispersing the output more widely). It’s reasonable to assume, then, that whenever you breathe out, eventually those … Continue reading