fleshyorgans

I’ve been thinking about how people like to construct stories around things, make their lives seem to have meaning or destiny, etc a lot,lately. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that there really isn’t any a priori reason for things — giving an explanation is just so we can handle it and not go [...]

I was thinking about humor this morning, wondering what use laughter has for humans. I’ve long wondered this, actually. I never really bought the whole “social glue” idea, that laughter is just emergent as a way to bond. Even though humor plays a role in relationships, it still doesn’t describe how it started. Namely, why [...]

Link: Frankenstein’s Monster, Technological Artifact: Is it the device that’s important or the things that allowed the device to exist that are important? What you think of as “technology” is probably wrong.
It’s not the smart phone that is the…

Video : first cyborg of the world: The future is now! A robot controlled by living neurons!
This is kind of incredible, and it bypasses the whole AI problem by just putting a real brain into the machine. I will say I kind of feel bad for the rat donors…

Ritalin in the Water and Misinterpretations: Jonah Lehrer writes in the linked article about some surprising things he found, just from looking into an internet troll’s vitriolic comment.  I’m taking a different tack than Jonah on this, however: …

Nature by Numbers 

The Itch of Curiosity | Wired Science: A short piece about research into curiosity. Funny that people stopped researching it in the first place.
And it’s interesting to me because I’d never thought of curiosity as an emotion before, but it totally …