Month: February 2014

The hard working but unloved multi-stage rocket

If you've ever read about rocket technology, particularly the issues involved in how much fuel is needed to get somewhere, you quickly run into a stark reality.  The payload, the part of the rocket that you want to get somewhere, is inevitably a tiny portion of the size and weight of the rocket. The rest … Continue reading The hard working but unloved multi-stage rocket →

When We Use Fate As A Scapegoat

Making decisions can be difficult, and making a hard decision can up the stress even more. A new study suggests that when we have an especially hard decision to make, we're more likely to use the belief in fate as a coping mechanism. The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, suggests that believing that … Continue reading When We Use Fate As A Scapegoat →

Astronomy’s Alpha Male | Seth Shostak

The other day, I asked if the age of science might eventually come to an end, noting that amateur scientific work has become rare.  In this post about the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, whose data findings will be made publicly available, Seth Shostak describes a situation that might enable amateur discoveries again, at least for … Continue reading Astronomy’s Alpha Male | Seth Shostak →

Where is the Earth located?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_l8CxIieVQ I enjoyed this video, but I wonder about Fraser's statement that cosmologists think if you travel in one direction long enough you'll eventually end up back where you are.  That is one model, but not the only one.  It depends on space being curved, and tests currently show it to be flat. Of course, … Continue reading Where is the Earth located? →

The War on Reason – Paul Bloom – The Atlantic

Paul Bloom has an interesting article at the The Atlantic, much of which I agree with. Aristotle’s definition of man as a rational animal has recently taken quite a beating. Part of the attack comes from neuroscience. Pretty, multicolored fMRI maps make clear that our mental lives can be observed in the activity of our neurons, … Continue reading The War on Reason – Paul Bloom – The Atlantic →

The faster interstellar travel is, the further away intelligent aliens are

Ethan Siegel has an excellent post up exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. With hundreds of billions of stars (visible, above, in infrared wavelengths) in our galaxy alone, and literally trillions of planets around them, we have many, many chances for life to have evolved similarly to how it did here on Earth. With at … Continue reading The faster interstellar travel is, the further away intelligent aliens are →

How apraxia got my son suspended from school – Michael Graziano – Aeon

I've written before about Michael Graziano and his attention schema theory of consciousness, which seem to me to be the best candidate right now for a scientific theory that actually explains consciousness without resorting to magic steps or simply asserting that it doesn't exist. But this article isn't about that.  It's a sobering tale of … Continue reading How apraxia got my son suspended from school – Michael Graziano – Aeon →

Using distant quasars to close the “free will” loophole

Given the conversations some of us have had over determinism and the possibility of quantum hidden variables, I thought this was particularly interesting. In a paper published this week in the journal Physical Review Letters, MIT researchers propose an experiment that may close the last major loophole of Bell's inequality—a 50-year-old theorem that, if violated … Continue reading Using distant quasars to close the “free will” loophole →

Free will and determinism are separate issues

Jerry Coyne as a new post up on free will. One of the recurrent arguments made by free-will “compatibilists” (i.e., those who see free will as being compatible with physical determinism), is that those of us who are incompatibilists—in my case, I think people conceive of free will as reflecting a dualistic “ghost in the … Continue reading Free will and determinism are separate issues →