Technology and Erasure of Self

Blogs

There was quite a long piece in The Verge recently about AI writing tools – specifically Sudowrite. Sudowrite is a piece of software based on Open AI’s language model GPT-3. These kinds of tools are particularly interesting to me because I studied artificial intelligence as…

New Lens Old Data

Blogs

I don’t know why the research just keeps coming right now, but after the work, I mentioned in my last two essays was published, there is now another piece in another field that suggests life began on earth almost as soon as the planet formed….

On The Tenacity Of Life

Blogs

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about the possibility that life is not some ultra-rare miracle, but rather potentially inevitable. A few pieces of new research out in the last few weeks reinforce this possibility, and develop it, but from different angles…

The Drolatic Meditations of Pantagruel

Blogs

In 1565, shortly after the publication of the last volume of Rabelais’ “Life of Gargantua and Pantagruel,” a book was published by Richard Breton containing 120 engravings of fantastic figures. The book claimed to be associated with Rabelais but was actually the work of François…

Life In Hell

Blogs

A new analysis of one of the oldest rocks ever found now suggests that life may have thrived on Earth a mere 300 hundred million years after the planet’s accretion. If correct (and the evidence is pretty compelling), this is mind-boggling for two different reasons,…

Why ET Won’t Return Our Calls?

Blogs

Why do we expect aliens to be more altruistic than we are? We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo message – the radio signal we beamed out to Globular Cluster M13 in 1974 which contained 1,679 bits of data communicating some of…

Can Jerome Powell Impact Human Evolution?

Blogs

One of the ways in which Game Theory has been applied to Evolutionary Biology is through the development of Signaling Theory. Here, the concept goes, prey and predators or potential mates communicate with each other using signals like calls or dances or pretty feathers and…

Uptown Rats and London Underground Mosquitoes

Blogs

In a paper published just a few years ago, it was determined that there are populations of rats in Manhattan which can be distinguished by neighborhood.[1] Specifically Uptown and Downtown Rats. Likewise, the London Underground species of mosquito is distinct from the surface species, biting…

Relativity, Vaccination, and Tag

Blogs

Every day on the way home from school I ask my 7-year-old the highlight of his day. Yesterday, it was “playing ‘vaccine’ with my friends.” It turned out that “playing vaccine” meant someone was “giving out the vaccine” and people would refuse to get it…

Human Action

Blogs

I noticed that, on Wikipedia, the number of significant libraries listed as destroyed by “human action” is much greater than the number destroyed by natural causes. Certainly, many of these were because of disagreements with ideologies expressed in texts in those libraries. But many of…