It is hard for people to get their minds around small probabilities, very long times, the very small, and the very large, which is why people have a hard time accepting the theories of evolution, quantum mechanics, relativity, and cosmology, which depend crucially on them. [Read more…]
Anyone who has played even a little of modern video games would be impressed at their realistic quality. The avatars on the screen have been programmed to look almost human. Now what if the designers could program the avatars to have thoughts as well, and that we make them do things by affecting their thinking and putting thoughts in their heads. So rather than making them do things, we give them the thought that makes them do things, as if they had decided to do so themsleves. Then the avatars might think that they are real and acting on their own volition and not being manipulated by an outside agency. [Read more…]
One of the things that really annoys me is what I like to call ‘first world whines’. These are the complaints of people who live lives so pampered that the slightest inconvenience causes them to throw a tantrum.
Take for example, airline flight. This has become unpleasant for many reasons but the one thing that does not bother me is being asked to shut off personal electronic devices (PED) during the take off and landing stages. It seems like such a tiny price to pay in exchange for reducing the chances of the plane crashing. [Read more…]
In the spirit of exploring this issue more deeply during the current National Masturbation Month, I looked into how close to the truth is the old joke that that 98% of people masturbate while the other 2% are liars. [Read more…]
I am fortunate to have never been near a tornado. The deadly ones that hit Oklahoma yesterday were massive. There is a breed of people called tornado chasers who actually seek them out to follow and photograph, some for scientific purposes, others just for the thrill of it. [Read more…]
Nearly three decades ago, work by James R. Flynn revealed that average IQ scores in developed countries were rising at a stunning pace, of the order of 0.3 points per year or more. Later work showed similar explosive gains in developing countries and that the rise (now dubbed ‘the Flynn effect’) is still continuing. How did he find this? Recall that although IQ tests themselves have changed over time, each revision requires the IQ scores to be normed to always have an average value of 100. So does someone who scores 100 today have the same IQ of someone who scored 100 say fifty years ago, since they took different tests? Flynn found that if you give people today old IQ tests, their scores rose steadily the older the tests, suggesting that IQ tests have got harder over time. (James R. Flynn, Are We Getting Smarter?, 2012) [Read more…]
The Jason Richwine dissertation, like its predecessor The Bell Curve in 1994, argued that IQ scores are a good proxy for intelligence, that intelligence has a substantial hereditary component and is thus largely immutable to change by external measures, and that high IQ levels are significant predictors of economic and social success in life while low levels predict a life of crime, unemployment, and general failure. According to Richwine, American Hispanics have average IQs around 89 (the overall average is fixed to be 100) and thus Hispanic immigrants will be a drain on society. (See here and here for earlier posts on this.) [Read more…]
I have heard about retroviruses and that HIV belonged to that family but not being a biologist knew nothing more about what a retrovirus was and how it differed from any other virus. This article by Carl Zimmer explains what they are and in addition says that new research about them has revealed that we all have a lot of retroviruses that invaded our DNA a long time ago and that over time have mutated to become either inactive or dormant. [Read more…]
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with partisanship. We often have to decide one way or the other on some issue and in the absence of any significant information that dictates how to choose, it is not unreasonable for people to align themselves with ‘their’ side, with those with whom they feel generally close to on most issues. [Read more…]
Two years ago, I wrote about research that found that those people who tried to multitask (i.e., switch rapidly between different cognitive tasks) were highly inefficient in procession information when compared to those who did the same work sequentially. They suffered in all three major areas that would be necessary to multitask: the ability to filter (i.e., to detect irrelevancy so as to be able to quickly distinguish between those things that are important and those that are not), the rapidity with which they could switch from one task to the next, and the ability to sort and organize the information in the brain so as to keep track of the results of their different tasks. [Read more…]