http://www.strange-loops.com/blog Science, philosophy, politics, and the human (or transhuman) condition Wed, 12 May 2010 21:12:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT’S relativity." –attributed to Albert Einstein Our subjective experience of how fast time is passing depends on the situation we are ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=62 My grandfather lived a long life, well into his eighties. In his later years, he was caught in the grip of full-blown Parkinson’s dementia, and doctors suspected Alzheimer’s disease. He didn’t recognize people he had known all his life. He generally couldn’t hold a conversation, not even a snippet of ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=60 You have ten times as many bacterial cells as human ones in your body, and that leaves out viruses and fungi. Are those non-human creatures in your body part of you? It’s easy to think of them as ‘not you’, as little Others along for the ride on your body. They ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=59 As a species with the apparently rare gift of being able to contemplate life and death, being able to choose our own end should we desire it, we are endowed, unavoidably, with the problem of suicide. ”There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=56 "Once the decision has been made, close your ear even to the best counter argument: sign of a strong character. Thus an occasional will to stupidity." --Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil We live in a world of many choices: the foods we eat, the careers we choose, the relationships we foster, ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=55 Since Einstein's work on relativity, we have come to think of our universe not simply as involving three spatial dimensions and one time dimension, but rather as a four-dimensional entirety, labeled space-time. Roughly speaking, instead of thinking there are different versions of an object (my car in the past, my ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=54 Stephen Pinker has a pretty decent article up in the New York Times called My Genome, My Self about the topic of personal genomics, i.e. getting your DNA analyzed to discover your own 'genetic code'. For example, having a certain set of alleles (versions of a gene) guarantees that your ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=53 I just finished reading The Autobiography of Abbie Hoffman (published 1980). This activist, revolutionary, brilliant guy embodied the heart of the 60s, and indeed embodies the heart of all activists fighting against a corrupt, messed-up system. Abbie Hoffman was a smart kid born in 1936 to an Ashkenazi Jewish family that ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=51 "The inability of the Colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the international bankers was the prime reason for the revolutionary war." --Benjamin Franklin The video below, by Paul Grignon, is a superb animated history of money, explaining how our current ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=50 When you think of intelligent non-human animals, you probably think of apes: they use tools, appear to have culture, can be taught language-like communication systems, and the list of uniquely human traits seems to be ever-shrinking thanks to them. Maybe you include dolphins in your list of smart animals. When asked ... http://www.strange-loops.com/blog/?p=49