Category: Blog
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Hippy, capitalist, guru, grocer
Most people would have given up, but Saunders was not most people. “Anyone can do it,” he was fond of saying to sceptics. “It’s really quite simple.” https://www.theguardian.com/food/2024/jan/23/nicholas-saunders-forgotten-genius-changed-british-food
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Fermi’s Paradox and TikTok
Though written in 2007, the arguments still stack up: So, it looks as if there are two possibilities. Perhaps our science over-estimates the likelihood of extra-terrestrial intelligence evolving. Or, perhaps evolved technical intelligence has some deep tendency to be self-limiting, even self-exterminating. After Hiroshima, some suggested that any aliens bright enough to make colonizing space-ships…
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Daniel Dennett is Dead
I read his Consciousness Explained and Darwin’s Dangerous Idea in grad school and when I came back to reading about the mind, I started by rereading CE and then went on to his latest, From Bacteria to Bach and Back He is, without doubt the biggest influence on my thought. I find his reductive, materialist,…
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Jonathan Bernard : « Si le temps d’écran a son importance, le contexte d’exposition des enfants compte beaucoup si ce n’est plus »
On a pu mesurer que tous les domaines cognitifs ne sont pas touchés de la même façon : le langage, expressif comme réceptif, est affecté chez les jeunes enfants, davantage que la motricité ou le raisonnement non verbal. Nous avons aussi pu constater que, si le temps d’écran a son importance, le contexte d’exposition compte beaucoup si ce…
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‘Like a film in my mind’: hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imaginations
Using fMRI to scan the brains of people at rest, he has found that hyperphantasic people have greater connectivity between the prefrontal cortex, which is involved in “higher-order” thinking such as planning and decision-making, and the areas responsible for visual processing, which lie towards the back of the skull. “My guess is that if you…
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Physicist Claudia de Rham: ‘Gravity connects everything, from a person to a planet’
Gravity is so universal. And I think this is very fundamental, it’s a phenomenon that affects everything, everyone, all the time, everywhere. It does absolutely everything: it connects everything and everyone. We all experience it in the same way, whether we are a person or a planet, a black hole or a balloon, a hammer,…