Many people are unable to speak, either from birth or due to something that happened later in life. Thanks to modern technology, we now have voice synthesizers that enable them to translate their written words into sounds. Stephen Hawking is perhaps the person whom we are most familiar with who uses this.
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There were several commenters who disagreed with my assertion in an earlier post that belief in both god and evolution by natural selection are incompatible and forces one to choose one or the other. They pointed out that there were large numbers of people who believed in both god and evolution or that the tremendous suffering that occurs in nature was incompatible with only a loving omnipotent god or that I was being parochial and equating all religious people with the young Earth Christians in the US.
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Via Machines Like Us, I came across this video of a crow (named 007) solving an extremely difficult puzzle. According to this article: [Read more…]
Someone I know said that a friend of his had spoken of penguins as being frightening creatures. He was puzzled by this and upon questioning him realized that he thought that penguins were large animals, roughly the size of an adult human. [Read more…]
We are always warned that a statistical correlation should not be used to infer causation because either the causal relationship can go either way or both effects may be due to a third cause. The only way to truly determine the direction of causality is to design experiments that are specifically meant to tease it out. But sometimes we can be fooled by multiple, seemingly independent correlations that strongly suggest causality. A recent study of vitamin D deficiency and health illustrates this danger. [Read more…]
If there is one thing that religions absolutely must believe in, it is the existence of the soul, although not all religions give it the same name. Without the belief that there is some entity that is part of us and yet somehow independent of the body and can interact freely with an external deity, much of religious doctrine becomes even more vacuous than it currently is. [Read more…]
You may have heard about ‘moon illusion’, the way the full moon looks much larger when it is just over the horizon than when it is high in the sky. Many people will swear that it actually does appear larger and concoct theories as to why it is so, when the reality is that the larger size is a trick our brain plays on us, though there is no consensus on how it does it. In an earlier post I examined some of the explanations. [Read more…]