{ During the 1950s, with vinyl scarce, Russians began recording rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and boogie woogie on used X-rays that they gathered from hospitals and doctors’ offices. | NPR | full story }
I understand by ‘God’ the perfect being, where a being is perfect just in case it has all perfections essentially and lacks all imperfections essentially. […]
Given that there are good reasons for thinking that the premises of the Compossibility Argument (CA) are true, it seems to me we have a good reason to think that God’s existence is possible. Of course, this does not, by itself, allow us to conclude to the much more important thesis that God exists, and so the atheist can consistently admit God’s possibility and maintain her atheism.
{ C’Zar Bernstein/Academia | Continue reading }
The omnipotence paradox states that: If a being can perform any action, then it should be able to create a task which this being is unable to perform; hence, this being cannot perform all actions. Yet, on the other hand, if this being cannot create a task that it is unable to perform, then there exists something it cannot do.
One version of the omnipotence paradox is the so-called paradox of the stone: “Could an omnipotent being create a stone so heavy that even he could not lift it?” If he could lift the rock, then it seems that the being would not have been omnipotent to begin with in that he would have been incapable of creating a heavy enough stone; if he could not lift the stone, then it seems that the being either would never have been omnipotent to begin with or would have ceased to be omnipotent upon his creation of the stone.
The argument is medieval, dating at least to the 12th century, addressed by Averroës (1126–1198) and later by Thomas Aquinas. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (before 532) has a predecessor version of the paradox, asking whether it is possible for God to “deny himself”.
[…]
A common response from Christian philosophers, such as Norman Geisler or Richard Swinburne is that the paradox assumes a wrong definition of omnipotence. Omnipotence, they say, does not mean that God can do anything at all but, rather, that he can do anything that’s possible according to his nature.
related { Jesus and Virgin Mary spotted on Google Earth pic }
For all those brunettes wishing they were naturally blond, a small genetic change could have made all the difference. Scientists have found that replacing one of DNA’s four letters at a key spot in the genome shifts a particular gene’s activity and leads to fairer hair. Not only does the work provide a molecular basis for flaxen locks, but it also demonstrates how changes in segments of DNA that control genes, not just changes in genes themselves, are important to what an organism looks like. […]
Over the past 6 years, studies of genetic variation in thousands of people have linked at least eight DNA regions to blondness based on the fact that a certain DNA letter, or base, was found in people with that hair color but not in people with other hair colors. Some of those base changes, or single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), were in genes involved in the production of pigments, such as melanin. Mutations in these genes typically change skin and hair color. Other SNPs lay outside genes but could be part of the regulatory DNA that helps control the function of genes nearby. Changes in that regulatory DNA could result in hair color but not skin color change, or vice versa, because regulatory DNA can change gene activity in just certain parts of the body.
related { Smokers with gene defect have one in four chance of developing lung cancer }
Child draws all over dad’s passport, dad gets stuck in South Korea
Parenting Rewires the Male Brain
New research shows that people are more likely to pick a mate with similar DNA
The Top Ten Worst Reasons to Stay Friends With Your Ex
Closing roads can improve everyone’s commute time. You might want to shoot to miss in war. Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive
The best way to win an argument
Machines vs. Lawyers: As information technology advances, the legal profession faces a great disruption.
Collision Detection: Bees versus Fish
An air conditioner, powered by fans
20% of Europeans have never used the internet
Time spent looking at screens spent each day by people in different countries
Watermelon juice relieves post-exercise muscle soreness
If we split life into 5000 days units
Physiology and neuroscience combine to explain Bruce Lee’s famous strike, the one-inch punch.
Gelignite, or blasting gelatin, is a mixture of nitroglycerin, gun cotton, and a combustible substance like wood pulp. It resembles dynamite (also invented by Alfred Nobel) but can be conveniently molded into shape with the bare hands.
The October 6, 1904 issue of Russian Doctor contained a dispatch about a young woman who “found a cartridge containing this substance in her husband’s trunk and ate it, taking the cartridge for a piece of confectionery.” Despite her husband’s fears, she neither exploded nor expired from the effects of the poison, as summarized in the New York Medical Journal six weeks later.
Paul Ingrisano, a pirate living in Brooklyn New York, filed a trademark under “Pi Productions” for a logo which consists of this freely available version of the pi symbol π from the Wikimedia website combined with a period (full stop). The conditions of the trademark specifically state that the trademark includes a period.
The trademark was granted in January 2014 and Ingrisano has recently made trademark infringement claims against a massive range of pi-related designs on print-on-demand websites including Zazzle and Cafepress.
Surprisingly, Zazzle accepted his claim and removed thousands of clothing products using this design.
It is just possible to discern some points beneath the heated rhetoric in which Patricia Churchland indulges. But none of these points is right. If you hold that “mental processes are actually processes in the brain,” to quote Churchland, then you are committed to the thesis that it is sufficient to understand the mind that one understands the brain, and not merely necessary. This is just the well-known “identity theory” of mind and brain: mental processes are identical to brain processes; and the identity of a with b entails the sufficiency of a for b. To hold the weaker thesis that knowledge of the brain is merely necessary for knowledge of the mind is consistent even with being a heavy-duty Cartesian dualist, since even such a dualist accepts that mind depends causally on brain.
{ Patricia Churchland vs. Colin McGinn/NY Review of Books | Continue reading }
Those parents at the park taking all those photos are actually paying less attention to the moment, she says, because they’re focused on the act of taking the photo.
“Then they’ve got a thousand photos, and then they just dump the photos somewhere and don’t really look at them very much, ’cause it’s too difficult to tag them and organize them,” says Maryanne Garry, a psychology professor at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. […]
Henkel, who researches human memory at Fairfield University in Connecticut, found what she called a “photo-taking impairment effect.”
“The objects that they had taken photos of — they actually remembered fewer of them, and remembered fewer details about those objects. Like, how was this statue’s hands positioned, or what was this statue wearing on its head. They remembered fewer of the details if they took photos of them, rather than if they had just looked at them,” she says.
Henkel says her students’ memories were impaired because relying on an external memory aid means you subconsciously count on the camera to remember the details for you.
In a paper published in the journal Science, physicists reported that they were able to reliably teleport information between two quantum bits separated by three meters, or about 10 feet.
Quantum teleportation is not the “Star Trek”-style movement of people or things; rather, it involves transferring so-called quantum information — in this case what is known as the spin state of an electron — from one place to another without moving the physical matter to which the information is attached.
Important peculiarities of the human memory system:
— A remarkable capacity for storing information is coupled with a highly fallible retrieval process.
— What is accessible in memory is highly dependent on the current environmental, interpersonal, emotional and body-state cues.
— Retrieving information from memory is a dynamic process that alters the subsequent state of the system.
— Access to competing memory representations regresses towards the earlier representation over time.
Man in his underwear steals NYC bread truck, makes deliveries
9/11 Memorial has banned soap, gum chewing, and a lot of other things
Families infuriated by ‘crass commercialism’ of 9/11 Museum gift shop
Personal judgments are swayed by group opinion, but only for 3 days
Mutations in a particular gene can cause indecision in flies
Women’s use of red clothing as a sexual signal in intersexual interaction [PDF]
A hormone associated with longevity also appears to make people’s brains work better.
Ever-rising IQ scores suggest that future generations will make us seem like dimwits in comparison
Darkcoin, the Shadowy Cousin of Bitcoin, Is Booming
Forget ‘the Cloud’; ‘the Fog’ Is Tech’s Future
A startup aims to let you charge your gadgets without plugging them in.
A Multiplayer Game Environment Is Actually a Dream Come True for an Economist
There’s how you see yourself. And there’s how the rest of the world sees you.
‘Zodiac’ The Film Vs The Real Zodiac Killer Case
‘Bring Out The Gimp’: The Man Behind The Mask In ‘Pulp Fiction’
Meek, who believes that Cyrus communicates with him through her songs…
A GIF of a Vine of a video of a Flipbook of a GIF of a video of a roller coaster.
Researchers are a step closer to demonstrating that explosives – rather than water – could be used to extinguish an out-of-control bushfire.
Dr Graham Doig, of the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, is conducting the research, which extends a long-standing technique used to put out oil well fires.
The process is not dissimilar to blowing out a candle: it relies on a blast of air to knock a flame off its fuel source.
Levi CEO’s jeans go unwashed for year; no ’skin disease’ yet
New plastic surgery installs ‘internal bra’ under the skin for ‘firm, young-looking breasts’
Dozens of microbial species may have accompanied the Curiosity rover to Mars
Plastic That Can Repair Itself
1,730 cash machines in Poland are to be given ‘Finger Vein’ technology
Shopping online: Why do too many photos confuse consumers?
The Weird World Hidden in Software License Agreements
Time Inc. Starts Selling Ads on Magazine Covers, Breaking Industry Taboo
How Much Does It Cost to Book Your Favorite Band?
Fridge magnet research update: Why the fridge?
While both tourism research and photography research have grown into substantial academic disciplines, little has been written about their point of intersection: tourist photography. In this paper, I argue that a number of philosophically oriented theories of photography may offer useful perspectives on tourist photography. […]
When I was observing photographing tourists on the Pont Neuf and in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, one of the things that struck me was the fact that some tourists, when they came across a sculpture, first took a picture of it, and only started looking after the picture had been taken. Perhaps Sontag is right to argue that the production of pictures serves to appease the tourist’s anxiety about not working; in any case, this type of predatory photographic behavior promotes the accumulation of images to a goal in itself rather than a means to produce meaning or memories.
The atomists held that there are two fundamentally different kinds of realities composing the natural world, atoms and void. Atoms, from the Greek adjective atomos or atomon, ‘indivisible,’ are infinite in number and various in size and shape, and perfectly solid, with no internal gaps. They move about in an infinite void, repelling one another when they collide or combining into clusters by means of tiny hooks and barbs on their surfaces, which become entangled. Other than changing place, they are unchangeable, ungenerated and indestructible. All changes in the visible objects of the world of appearance are brought about by relocations of these atoms: in Aristotelian terms, the atomists reduce all change to change of place. Macroscopic objects in the world that we experience are really clusters of these atoms; changes in the objects we see—qualitative changes or growth, say—are caused by rearrangements or additions to the atoms composing them. While the atoms are eternal, the objects compounded out of them are not.
In supposing that void exists, the atomists deliberately embraced an apparent contradiction, claiming that ‘what is not’ exists.
{ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }
Scientists discover how to turn light into matter after 80-year quest.
{ The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy | Continue reading }
The brain systems that modulate “that loving feeling” are only just beginning to be understood, but neuroscience research is pointing more and more to the idea that the sensation of love relies on the same brain circuitry that goes awry in addiction. Love is a drug, basically — because only a drive as strong as an addiction could keep couples together through the stresses of parenting and keep parents tied to their kids.
Research has found, for example, that people in love are similar to those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder — not only in terms of their obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior, but also the low levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin in their blood. So in a sense, love may be a special case of addiction
“The bottom line is that a lot of data on people rejected in love show that the major pathways linked with addiction become activated,” says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University. If love is a drug, however, love’s chemistry can be chemically manipulated — those who are in love but don’t want to be could potentially take a pill that simply makes the formerly loved one seem no more special than a stranger.
“Love hurts”—as the saying goes—and a certain amount of pain and difficulty in intimate relationships is unavoidable. Sometimes it may even be beneficial, since adversity can lead to personal growth, self-discovery, and a range of other components of a life well-lived.
But other times, love can be downright dangerous. It may bind a spouse to her domestic abuser, draw an unscrupulous adult toward sexual involvement with a child, put someone under the insidious spell of a cult leader, and even inspire jealousy-fueled homicide. […]
Modern neuroscience and emerging developments in psychopharmacology open up a range of possible interventions that might actually work. These developments raise profound moral questions about the potential uses—and misuses—of such anti-love biotechnology. In this article, we describe a number of prospective love-diminishing interventions, and offer a preliminary ethical framework for dealing with them responsibly should they arise.
There is no point faking it in bed because chances are your sexual partner will be able to tell. A study by researchers at the University of Waterloo found that men and women are equally perceptive of their partners’ levels of sexual satisfaction. […]
Couples in a sexual relationship develop what psychologists call a sexual script, which forms guidelines for their sexual activity. “Over time, a couple will develop sexual routines,” said Fallis. “We believe that having the ability to accurately gauge each other’s sexual satisfaction will help partners to develop sexual scripts that they both enjoy. Specifically, being able to tell if their partners are sexually satisfied will help people decide whether to stick with a current routine or try something new.”
This paper studies gender differences in strategic situations. In two experimental guessing games - the beauty contest and the 11-20 money request game - we analyze the depth of strategic reasoning of women and men. We use unique data from an internet experiment with more than 1,000 participants. We find that men, on average, perform more steps of reasoning than women. Our results also suggest that women behave more consistently across both games.
related { How Males and Females Differ in Their Likelihood of Transmitting Negative Word of Mouth }
Resveratrol, a polyphenol found in grapes, red wine, chocolate, and certain berries and roots, is considered to have antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anticancer effects in humans and is related to longevity in some lower organisms.
Objective: To determine whether resveratrol levels achieved with diet are associated with inflammation, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mortality in humans.
Results: Resveratrol levels achieved with a Western diet did not have a substantial influence on health status and mortality risk of the population in this study.
Red wine may not be as good for you as hoped, say scientists who have studied the drink’s ingredient that is purported to confer good health.
Many gardeners and horticulturalists seek non-chemical methods to control populations of snails. It has frequently been reported that snails that are marked and removed from a garden are later found in the garden again. This phenomenon is often cited as evidence for a homing instinct.
We report a systematic study of the snail population in a small suburban garden, in which large numbers of snails were marked and removed over a period of about 6 months. While many returned, inferring a homing instinct from this evidence requires statistical modelling. […]
Maximum likelihood techniques infer the existence of two groups of snails in the garden: members of a larger population that show little affinity to the garden itself, and core members of a local garden population that regularly return to their home if removed. The data are strongly suggestive of a homing instinct, but also reveal that snail-throwing can work as a pest management strategy.
{ The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences | Continue reading | LA Times }
