Random Fact of the Day
March 31, 2005 top

Dolphins, who due to their environment must make an intentional choice to breathe (unlike humans whose bodies will take in air automatically), only sleep with half of their brain at a time. For about eight hours a day, dolphins are working on half a brain and the other half is getting a break. They never fully sleep like we do, with the entire brain.

What is it like for half your brain to be asleep? Is it akin to drifting in and out of sleep after hitting snooze on an alarm clock in the morning? Or more like daydreaming? Or is it a vastly different state we cannot really grok in our current physiological existence?

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Edited and somewhat reworked a short short story from a while back and added it to the fiction section. Communion.

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Added an article entitled Proving a Negative - Disproving God to the freethought section of the philosophy page.

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Added an article on sleeping pills and stuff to the politics/society page.

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Added an article on cochlear implants and Deaf culture to the politics/society page.

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I significantly updated the abortion article in the politics section. Is abortion just an easy fix? When is it wrong? I give some of my thoughts.

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"All the limitative theorems of metamathematics and the theory of computation suggest that once the ability to represent your own structure has reached a certain critical point, that is the kiss of death: it guarantees that you can never represent yourself totally. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, Church's Undecidability Theorem, Turing's Halting Problem, Turski's Truth Theorem - all have the flavor of some ancient fairy tale which warns you that 'To seek self-knowledge is to embark on a journey which...will always be incomplete, cannot be charted on a map, will never halt, cannot be described."
-Douglas Hofstadter

[Courtesy of Whiskey River]

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