While I was doing my undergraduate studies, in addition to my Engineering degree, and my minor in Philosophy, I also pursed a number of “options”, notably including an option in Cognitive Studies. Both the mechanics of thinking and the philosophy of cognition and identity were (and remain) of great interest to me.I wonder if there’s anything to be noted from… Read more →
Tag: academic papers
Monday Night Miscellany
Like real-time strategy games? Like science fiction? How about a real-time strategy game where you (and your units) can time travel. Imagine sending future units back to fight alongside themselves against an enemy in the past… you thought keeping track of your units and tech tree was a headache, wait for the fourth dimension. Maybe before you get too interested… Read more →
Eight links make a post
And now, for another exciting post of links and short comments: I’ve always been aware of having been gifted with a pretty powerful attention span. I have always kind of assumed it came from becoming a reader at a very young age, but I guess it’s equally plausible that things are actually ordered the other way and my resistance to… Read more →
Reality Shock
It’s pretty common these days for me to read something and react with “Wow, that’s like something from a science fiction story I read X years ago”. In addition to this being common, I’ve also noticed that X is decreasing. Some examples, just of things I read in the last day or two: Teleportation. OK, admittedly, it’s a very low… Read more →
My nocturnally-biased suprachiasmatic nuclei
For at least 20 years now, I’ve known that I’m both happiest, and most productive, with a schedule where I am awake until the wee hours of the morning (between 2 and 4AM), and sleep until roughly the crack of noon. I haven’t been able to achieve that often, and its been more than four years now since I could… Read more →
All that foil-folding work for nothing…
At some past jobs, although not so much at this one, I’ve been the guy that my co-workers referred to as “tinfoil hat security guy”. I was the one who worried about cookies and tracking before most people did (and well before we all just gave up because Google knows everything about us), who raved about TIA and Carnivore, who… Read more →
Closing tabs from last year
You know the drill. I’m skipping the stuff that deals with Bush, Harper, or books, which should get their own posts. I had a weird fascination with Cass Elliot for a while there, primarily as a reaction to how much I was digging her tune California Earthquake. There were some weird side effects of this, from the relatively obvious, like… Read more →
The Cold Ruling Class
Some recent research (here’s the researcher, by the way) might shed some light on a lot of what happens both inside modern capitalist societies and between the West and the rest of the world–or at least on how some things are allowed to happen. Not coincidentally, the same light is shed on intra-organizational behaviours, which means this is probably something… Read more →
The key observation
Humans are essentially social animals. No man is an island. Etc. You’ve heard it all, but now there’s science that actually kind of shows it. Happiness, in short, is not merely a function of personal experience, but also is a property of groups. Emotions are a collective phenomenon. Happy people tend to cluster with happy people, and unhappy people likewise–shocking,… Read more →
I must be getting old
…because when I read an article with a throughline that’s essentially “Students lie, cheat, and steal a lot more than they used to, and still think they are good people, but it’s OK because there’s so much more stress on them, and anyway it’s not their fault but rather society’s” my reaction is essentially “Oh, phui!”. Everyone thinks they have… Read more →
Help With Trish’s Research
And now, you have a chance to help out with Trish’s research. I’ll use her words to explain: As most of us know and have experienced, sometimes painfully, sometimes to our benefit, the vast majority of software developers, and indeed these days the majority of professionals in general, work for a manager. Bad managers can frustrate us, decrease the quality… Read more →
A Disorganized Office Is A Sign Of…
Did you see any of the new stories about John Jost and teams’s forthcoming research paper? The one about how “behavioural residue” can be used to predict political leanings? “Conservative rooms tended to be cleaner, more brightly lit, better organized, less cluttered, and also more conventional and ordinary in terms of decoration,” Jost said during a panel discussion on “The… Read more →
Screen Reading
“The inclination to read a huge Victorian novel, the capacity to untangle a metaphor in a line of verse, the desire to study and emulate a distant historical figure, the urge to ponder a concept such as Heidegger’s ontic-ontological difference over and over and around and around until it breaks through as a transformative insight — those dispositions melt away… Read more →
I Just Don’t Get It.
In some ways I’m a classic information theory junkie–Claude Shannon changed the way I think about the universe just as much as any golden book. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, is something that I keep thinking I’ve finally had my “kick from the knee” moment with, and then something comes along to make it clear to me that I… Read more →
Cool Web Tool: The Awesome Highlighter.
That’s its name. Not that I don’t think it is awesome–I actually kind of do–but I think it’s even funnier that they called it “The Awesome Highlighter“. And it does just what you think, based on the name: you give it an URL, then you highlight parts of the page, and you get a link to your highlighted page that… Read more →
