Blogs
Bound Butterflies
Blogs
I want to talk about a common misconception – or perhaps simply “mis-emphasis” – that I see frequently in popular entertainment and media: The Butterfly Effect. The familiar statement of this concept derives from a 1972 lecture by Edward Lorenz who first described the effect…
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Thought Experiment Mash-Up Day (Part 2)
Blogs
Last week I had a brief look at the various ways physicists disagree on how consciousness might or might not affect the universe around us. Now I want to take a look at a new theory of consciousness itself and then speculate on the implications…
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Thought Experiment Mash-Up Day (Part 1)
Blogs
The 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics was recently given to three physicists for proving in various ways that the universe is not “locally real.” Some of you reading this will know what this means, but for those of you who do not, what you need…
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Slime-Mold Math
Blogs
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about Euplotes eurystomus and how its internal mechanical architecture acts as a state machine to allow this single-celled creature to behave in ways that seem “intelligent.” This week, Michelle Starr at ScienceAlert published a nice little…
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Not So Brownian After All
Blogs
There’s a new piece of research in Current Biology regarding the movement of a walking (yes, walking) single cell creature called Euplotes eurystomus which demonstrates pretty convincingly that the cell’s locomotion system is a relatively complex molecular finite-state machine. Its 14 “legs” (cirri) are interconnected…
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Do Integers Exist?
Blogs
Bear with me here. It’s clear that integers are incredibly practically useful at our scale of space-time. From buying 2 apples instead of 3 to enabling the Hayabusa asteroid interception missions, civilization is built on integers and the math derived from them (which includes the…
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Not Weird Worm Specific
Blogs
There’s a new study out about epigenetics and it’s just more proof that Lamarck may not have been as completely batty as we all learned in school. It does still appear to be true that Darwinian natural selection is the way evolution occurs, but it’s…
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This Aussie Cockatoo Nonsense
Blogs
There’s a viral story in the last day or so about cockatoos raiding people’s bins in Australia. The cockatoos learned to open people’s bins; people put bricks on the lids; the cockatoos learned to push them off; people did other things; the cockatoos can’t open…
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An Amazing Photograph, Lithium, And Consciousness
Blogs
I just saw this incredible picture today by Roberto Garcia-Roa of a “zombie fungus” fruiting from the body of one of its victims. You can read more about it here but what struck me particularly strongly in this photo is the fragility of self. Flies,…
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On Process
Blogs
Over the last decade or so there has been a lot of research dedicated to “Human Accelerated Regions (HAR’s).” These are the regions of our genetic code which have, for some reason, shown accelerated evolution since our divergence from chimpanzees about 7 million years ago…
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