Consider This...

posted 3 weeks ago - reblog

The universe is a big, complex machine. Learn how the machine works, and you can understand it and predict what it will do. Maybe no with absolute accuracy, because of quantum uncertainty, but you can know quite a bit.

People are robots. We may have a tiny shred of free will. The jury is still out on that. But mostly, we are robots. Learn how the machinery works, and you can understand why people do what they do, and how to move them to do other things.

I find it curious how often people engage in pseudoscience to try to understand the universe and achieve their goals. It used to be that such pseudosciences were all we really had. But these days, while we don’t have all the answers, we have a lot of them. We have more answers than a single person could ever learn in their life time. Each one of them is (probably) true, and each one will make us more able to understand how the universe is, predict what will happen in the future, and achieve the goals we want in life.

And yet, I still know more people who know more about astrology than neuroscience.

762 notes - posted 1 month ago - reblog

discoverynews:

Mars Viking Robots ‘Found Life’
New analysis of 36-year-old data, resuscitated from printouts, shows NASA found life on Mars, an international team of mathematicians and scientists conclude in a paper published this week.
Further, NASA doesn’t need a human expedition to Mars to nail down the claim, neuropharmacologist and biologist Joseph Miller, with the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine, told Discovery News.
“The ultimate proof is to take a video of a Martian bacteria. They should send a microscope — watch the bacteria move,” Miller said.
“On the basis of what we’ve done so far, I’d say I’m 99 percent sure there’s life there,” he added.
keep reading

298 notes - posted 1 month ago - reblog

discoverynews:

Recreating the Sounds of Mars and Venus
Should we ever succeed in sending astronauts to Mars or Venus, it’s likely they would need to stay on the planets for several months, at least — or possibly set up permanent shop there. But how would they fill their leisure hours? Perhaps they could start a band! But the very different atmospheres of Mars and Venus would make their voices and instruments sound very different than they would on Earth.Until now, we could only speculate about what those sounds might be. Only a couple of the probes we have sent into to space to explore our solar system have been equipped with microphones, and while sonification of the solar corona and the rings of Saturn offer haunting glimpses of the sounds of space, we have lacked any sense of sounds likely to be heard on the surfaces of other planets.Enter Tim Leighton, an acoustician at the University of Southampton in England, who has ingeniously employed the physics and mathematical tools of his trade to create the natural sounds one would be likely to hear on the surface of Mars or Venus — things like lightning, or whirlwinds, or even ice volcanoes found on Saturn’s moon, Titan.
keep reading

posted 1 month ago - reblog

With the extent to which everyone pretends to get along these days, I sometimes wonder how people would have acted if they had lived during the civil rights movement. Would they have fought for equal justice for all americans? Would they have demonized black people and blamed them for their own suffering? Would they have ignored it entirely? I feel that I have a window into the answer to that question when I hear the way people react to the Trayvon Martin case.

2,030 notes - posted 1 month ago - reblog

jtotheizzoe:

Have a radiator? Why not have a Thermosaurus?

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