Carl Zimmer has a nice summary of the increasing amount of fossil evidence for the evolution from dinosaurs to birds, surely one of the most fascinating facts of evolution. Interestingly, as the evidence mounts, the importance of Archaeopteryx, that classic fossil that caused such excitement when it was first discovered because it was the first direct evidence of the transition, has become diminished. [Read more…]
I dream a lot. Not a night goes by when I do not have quite vivid and complicated dreams so I am naturally interested in the phenomenon. Many of the details in my dreams can be clearly related to events that occurred within the previous day or two but some dreams are recurring. One is a dream in which I want to go to the bathroom and find it extraordinarily hard to find one or the ones that I find are so disgusting that I don’t want to use them. The other is where I have driven somewhere, parked the car and gone inside, and when I return the car is gone and I spend some time trying to search for it, without success. These two recurring dreams are apparently quite common for a lot of people. [Read more…]
The Prisoner’s Dilemma problem provides endless fascination for students of human psychology and has served as the foundation for many studies using game theory. There are endless variations of the basic idea and here is one version of it.
The basic version goes like this. Two criminals are arrested, but police can’t convict either on the primary charge, so they plan to sentence them to a year in jail on a lesser charge. Each of the prisoners, who can’t communicate with each other, are given the option of testifying against their partner. If they testify, and their partner remains silent, the partner gets 3 years and they go free. If they both testify, both get two. If both remain silent, they each get one.
We have all experienced occasions when a family member or friend tells us a story that they have told us before. Usually we pretend it is new to us because it seems somehow rude to tell them that they are repeating themselves. Also it is likely that we have done the same thing to others and so we also benefit from this act of politeness. I know that I have done so and only realized what I was doing later or half way through the story and, in the latter case, felt obliged to quickly complete it. This is because we all have a repertoire of stories that we draw upon repeatedly in conversations with others. [Read more…]
Remember the Segway? Now along comes a unicycle that operates similarly to that and has a self-balancing technology that makes it so stable that it is impossible to fall off it. It is called the RYNO and you can read more about it here. It can be parked anywhere that a bicycle can be parked. It is being marketed to commuters in dense traffic areas that have high parking charges. [Read more…]
I have long been fascinated by the fact that although we have gone so far in space exploration, we find it much harder to penetrate into the Earth. The deepest we get is in the oceans where we have gone to a depth of around 11 km in the place known as Challenger Deep that is located in the Marianas Trench. Here is a graphic of what we know about the Earth. [Read more…]
Conditional statements (i.e., statements of the form “If p, then q”, where p and q are statements) are staples of logic and are used widely in mathematics, science, philosophy, and everyday life. How do we judge whether such statements are true or not? Normally this is achieved by looking at whether each of the statements p and q are true or not, and whether the consequence follows from the antecedent. But it is not always that simple. [Read more…]
Cory Doctorow tells us more about this prize-winning effort.
Suicide is a disturbing topic that most of us would rather avoid thinking about. Recently I spoke with an old friend of mine. He was shaken up because just the previous day a work colleague and friend, a middle-aged man, had committed suicide. He said he was a cheerful, fun-loving person, hence his death came as a great shock. [Read more…]