When it comes to probabilities, our intuitions are not reliable, as I have written about before (see here and here). On so many occasions, I have thought that the result to a problem was so obvious as to not be worth thinking about more deeply, only to find myself proven wrong. And the new solution seems also so obvious that you wonder why you ever believed the earlier wrong answer. [Read more…]

We are constantly told to make our passwords more complex and harder to guess. And that is a good thing. But we should not imagine that merely making them longer or more obscure is sufficient.

Consider for example the password: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn1 [Read more…]

I have been fascinated with the research on the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of human beings ever since I read the research of Joseph Chang et. al. that suggested that that person could have lived as recently as about 50 CE or so, around the time of Jesus. (See here, here, and here for my previous posts on this topic.) [Read more…]

Over two years ago, I wrote about Chaser, a border collie that not only had a vocabulary of over a thousand words, she could also make logical inferences. I now learn via Machines Like Us that Chaser has got even smarter. Dan Nosowitz got a demonstration of what Chaser can do. [Read more…]

It is a little frustrating that we cannot see the workings of our own brain without the aid of external devices. But optical illusions are a fun way of getting some insight into the interplay of vision and cognition. I have a fondness for optical illusions and have shown and written about some of them in the past (see here, here, and here). There is something about the way that our brain manipulates the visual input to create something new and sometimes dynamic that fascinates me. [Read more…]

The Center Pompidou in Metz, France has constructed a building onto which the design group AntiVJ has projected an eye-catching display that is based on the hexagonal structures found on the ocean sea bed by an organism called the paleodictyon nodosum. [Read more…]

I came across this article about people who age unusually slowly, something I had never heard of before.

Gabby Williams has the facial features and skin of a newborn, and she is just as dependent. Her mother feeds, diapers and cradles her tiny frame as she did the day she was born.

The little girl from Billings, Mont., is 8 years old, but weighs only 11 pounds. Gabby has a mysterious condition, shared by only a handful of others in the world, that slows her rate of aging. [Read more…]

The word ‘scientism’ frequently crops up in discussions of atheism and religion. It is often used pejoratively as an epithet against new atheists, to suggest that they are somehow extremists who think that anything that is not science-based is somehow worthless. [Read more…]

I don’t drink alcohol. There are several reasons for it. One is that I just never developed the taste for it and find it unpleasant. Another is that Sri Lanka has a real drinking problem with many people drinking far too much too often and I had considerable first-hand awareness of the negative effects on them and their families and careers, which turned me off at an early age. The third is that on the solitary occasion where I had several drinks, I noticed that I was losing control of what I said and did, and it was not a pleasant feeling. As a result, I only drink wine on very rare occasions when offering a toast or something and have a beer once or twice a year at events where there is no alternative. [Read more…]

The global population exploded during the 20th century, aided in part by better public health that reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy. It now stands at around 7.1 billion. But how many people have lived during the entire time that homo sapiens have been around? [Read more…]