Research shows that human beings are not innately optimistic. Well, I never thought they were. Somehow, I’d missed the news of research that seemed to indicate that optimism was innate. Now they say that such research showing “optimism bias” was … Continue reading →
I have no idea whether this theory known as “Snowball Earth” has any validity at all, but it’s fascinating to contemplate it: The Snowball Earth hypothesis proposes that the Earth’s surface became entirely or nearly entirely frozen at least once, … Continue reading →
Practically everybody knows about Pavlov’s dogs. But do many people know about their master, Pavlov himself? The other day I started to wonder—apropos of just about nothing—why dogs? And was Pavlov mean to his dogs, or were they treated well? … Continue reading →
They’re certainly more amazing than I knew, anyway, and I already knew they were pretty amazing merely by looking at them. It’s the neck, of course—that impossibly long, impossibly stretched-out, Dr. Suess-like neck. I recently saw surprising footage of giraffes … Continue reading →
…there’s this.
Continue reading →Yesterday we had a discussion on this thread about whether polls are gamed in order to help a certain candidate or party. It’s a question that’s interesting enough to devote a whole other post to it. Then answer is: it … Continue reading →
…the universe is full of black holes. Probably. Maybe. Supermassive black holes with masses of more than 10bn suns have previously been found at the heart of large galaxies located in dense clusters in the universe. But this is the … Continue reading →
Crows are very smart birds, although they’ve long been thought to be harbingers of bad news: A crow’s brain is the size of a human thumb, huge relative to its body, putting their intelligence on par with primates and allowing … Continue reading →
Here.
Continue reading →Garbage in, garbage out?
Continue reading →You decide. I’d settle for intelligent. On the other hand, there’s this.
Continue reading →…is not the territory: Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s … Continue reading →