Archive for the ‘social environment’ Category
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
This video features Gordon Brown, talking openly about the balance between national and human interests. This is a hot spot in the attempt to recognize the individual as we identify with the collective.
Posted in Science, Society, Rant, evolution, religion, social environment | Comments Off
Saturday, April 18th, 2009
The relationship between the individual and the collective is our recurring concern here. I am delighted to see the wonderful Wynton Marsalis deliver a beautiful lecture about just that. His metaphors are apt, and have the ring of truth.
The lecture is here. Be entertained. Be very ...
Posted in Society, friends, social environment | Comments Off
Saturday, April 11th, 2009
I gave a talk in a pub, informally (25 mins) and there was a question and answer session afterwards.
Posted in Science, Rant, social environment | Comments Off
Friday, January 23rd, 2009
Here is an interesting project .
Computers are introduced into the wild (a rather romantic notion). Slum kids (who?) in India are exposed to computers without the benefit of any further guidance. No adults. No instructions. In an experiment repeated several times now, they go through several ...
Posted in Society, Neuroscience, evolution, social environment, philosophy | Comments Off
Saturday, October 11th, 2008
The PMF is not in the habit of recommending movies, but the world finds itself in the middle of a big ass financial storm, with nobody understanding what is going on, and with a re-design necessary. For times like these, the 2006 movie, "C.S.A. The Confederate States of America" ...
Posted in Society, social environment, madness | Comments Off
Thursday, June 5th, 2008
Michael Pollan offers a brief talk on TED that describes how different the world looks if one adopts a grasses point of view. The move is akin to Dawkins' famous adoption of the gene's point of view. The Pink Monkey Farm idea is similar. Following the thesis presented at PworldRworld.com, ...
Posted in Science, evolution, friends, social environment, philosophy | Comments Off
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
In a now classic article from 1977, Sverker Runeson observed that variables which we scientists consider to be basic, such as length, duration, etc, may or may not be basic from the point of view of opportunistic, evolved perceptual systems. He suggests that perception may consist of "smart mechanism" which ...
Posted in Neuroscience, Science, evolution, social environment | Comments Off
Monday, April 28th, 2008
Take any two human brains and compare them. Their coarse structure will be similar: here a gyrus, there the thalamus. The correspondence is pretty good as you look closer and closer, until you get down to a certain scale. The exact scale probably depends on the local ...
Posted in Neuroscience, Consciousness, religion, social environment, madness | Comments Off
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Allow me a small moment of hubris. We have been fundamentally wrong about what kind of thing the brain is. We have worked with the notion that it was some kind of a controller. This produces the embarrassing question of who is doing the controlling.
No.
Brains bring forth ...
Posted in Consciousness, Neuroscience, Science, evolution, philosophy, social environment, madness | Comments Off
Saturday, March 15th, 2008
In this remarkable talk at TED, Jill Bolte Taylor describes the phenomenology of a stroke. She gives a very moving and spirited account of what it felt like for her to suffer a major stroke which essentially knocked out the left half of her brain. The experience was essentially mystical ...
Posted in Consciousness, Neuroscience, Science, evolution, social environment, religion, philosophy | Comments Off