I have a huge discovery to share with you: Scotland is Pakistan. Consider: A mountaineous hinterland full of angry bearded men wearing women’s clothing, who seem to be suspiciously close to their livestock. Cuisine based on bits of sheep the … Continued
Nobody is more imaginative than a person who doesn’t want to concede an obvious point. As the internet brought 24/7 global debates, it also brought rapid innovation in the field of being a dishonest intransigent asswipe in the face of … Continued
How sweet something tastes is clearly a matter of acclimation. When you cut sugar from your diet, your sense of sweetness gets “downregulated” in a few weeks. Afterwards, sweet things often taste too sweet. So I have a plan to … Continued
People are wrong in many curious ways. A new one I noticed is assuming that a goal is silly, because people in the past tried to achieve it in silly ways. The thinking, if it can be called that, goes … Continued
Tardigrades can survive an extremely broad range of environments, including: Temperatures between -272°C (a degree above absolute zero) and 150°C. Pressures between a hard vacuum and 6000 atmospheres (six times the pressure at the bottom at the Mariana trench). 10 … Continued
According to a survey, which The Times cited without linking to it so I won’t either because I can’t find it, the best thing to say in your online dating profile is that you’re “outdoorsy”. For the sheer magnitude of … Continued
In a time of muddled language and words losing all meaning, it falls to the best and brightest among us to engage in a heroic effort to make language correspond to reality again, a Herculean, Confucius-inspired work of rectification of … Continued
The notion that laws of nature apply to humans gets called a lot of nasty names, such as “biological determinism”, but it is simply consistent science. This really shouldn’t be controversial. We now know all human traits have a genetic … Continued
First of all, commercializing Mars is not the point – colonizing Mars and becoming multiplanetary is good in itself. That being said, anything that’s self-sustaining and self-replicating grows exponentially to fill all available space. In the case of space, that’s a … Continued
There’s a theory called the “pump of evolution” that says mass extinction events were necessary for the rise of complex life, and eventually intelligence, although anyone who has spent more than five minutes on Twitter would seriously doubt intelligent life … Continued
Here’s something interesting: we’ve been selectively breeding crops and animals for thousands of years before any formal theory of evolution was written. Not only do we act on knowledge we don’t realize we have and would struggle to put into … Continued
Thinking about your life is valuable, and makes it more valuable. There have been roughly three traditional methods, all compatible: Therapy. Sitting in front of the fire in your study on the moors, with your trusty hound resting on your … Continued
Humanity will probably not remain a single species in the future. There’s a thing called the founder effect, which “…occurs when a small group of migrants that is not genetically representative of the ancestral population settles in a new area”. You … Continued
Fellow time-travelling artificial intelligence uploaded into a passable, but not entirely convincing human body Elon Musk has unveiled a new company – Neuralink. Ever the man to go after whatever promises the greatest possible benefit to mankind, he will be developing brain-computer … Continued
Let’s talk about wisdom, what it is and how it relates to intelligence. It’s in the title of the website, people use the word all the time, and yet, there seems to be no good definition. Let’s fix that. It’s one of these … Continued
When the world’s most valuable company presents a new product, I expect it to be a Martian colonial module, a fusion reactor or a hyperdrive, not a touch band to add emoji to messages half a second faster. There are multiple kinds … Continued
It’s amazing for people to work together and help each other. But “collectivism” is something else, typically a sneaky euphemism for the personal interests of a powerful few. Usually, fuzzy phrases such as “bigger society”, “community”, “solidarity” and “public interest” are … Continued
TLDR version: What you measure, you optimize. But there are important caveats. Two things happened in a day that triggered pattern recognition (no, not the looting and rioting in Charlotte): A study reports that fitness trackers make people lose less weight. … Continued
Cover photo credit: James Cridland. On June 6th, the Swiss rejected Universal Basic Income (UBI) in a referendum by an overwhelming margin of 77 to 23 %, which I publicly predicted on reddit weeks ago based on intimate knowledge of the … Continued
Today, The Wisdomination proudly presents a guest writer – a friend of almost three decades, an accomplished nuclear physicist and, most recently, a programmer of industrial robots. All his experience with coding left him convinced there is no such thing. … Continued