Brain Hammer

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Sunny

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What's it take to have a sunny disposition? Seriously. And let's make it literal. Solar.

Measure 's skull and its various features. The zygomatic arch. The foramen magnum. Now, let us imagine the distance from crown to jaw to be equivalent to the solar diameter. What's that number come out to?

Dude, the Earth's diameter is 12,756 kilometers. The Sun's is 1,390,000. One hundred and nine Earths can span the middle of the solar skull. Somebody else do the math. How many worlds? How hot the head?

The very act of thinking fuses hydrogen into helium.

That's totally hot.

Seriously.

Cars in the next lane really do go faster

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One frequent cause of why a lane (or a section of a lane) is slow is that there are too many cars in it. Even if the ultimate cause is something else (for example, road works) there is nonetheless typically a negative correlation between the speed of a lane and how densely packed it is with vehicles. Cars travelling at higher speeds are usually separated by longer distances than slower cars, which tend to bunch up. This leads to a higher density of cars in lanes travelling at slow speeds, meaning that over a given stretch of road there are likely to be more cars in the slower lane(s) than in the faster lane(s). This in turn means that, when driving on a two lane (or more) road system, more of the average driver's time is spent in the slower lane(s).

…

If you are driving on the motorway and think of your present observation as a random sample from all the observations made by all the drivers, then chances are that your observation will be made from the viewpoint that most drivers have, which is the viewpoint of the slow-moving lane (where more cars are likely to be). In other words, appearances are faithful: more often than not, the “next” lane is actually faster!

Hot Brains

A pretty cool example of exaptation in the service of information gathering:

Swordfish heat their eyes for the hunt
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Researchers already knew that certain large ocean predators - such as swordfish, tuna and some sharks - keep at least their eyes and brains warmer than the ambient ocean temperature. But this is the first convincing biological explanation for why, says the team led by Kerstin Fritsches at the University of Queensland, Australia.

In laboratories onboard research vessels in the Pacific Ocean, Fritsches and her colleagues took freshly caught swordfish and immediately removed the retinas. They varied the temperature of the retinas from 5°C to 25°C and exposed them to light flashes of different frequencies, at a range of intensities. They found that temperature had a big impact on the retinas' ability to distinguish between individual flashes, using measurements of the retinas' physiological response.
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It is not clear exactly how keeping the eyes and brain warmer prevents a deterioration of their vision. “But a temperature drop must affect transmission speed in nerves and other molecular and neurochemical processes, slowing the whole nerve response down,” Fritsches says.
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In swordfish, a part of one of the muscles that moves its eyes has adapted to produce heat instead. It warms up the blood, which is then moved towards the eye and the brain.

Cloudship New Hampshire
Originally uploaded by Dr. Smax.

The abduction wasn't the worst part. Coming back was.

(c) 2005 Pete Mandik

ZiF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WORKSHOP
Endophysics, Time, Quantum and the Subjective
January 17-22, 2005 / Bielefeld / Germany

Aim: The workshop will focus on the possible role of the endo-physical paradigm in the future development of physics and in our understanding of Nature as a whole. The main topics to be discussed are the nature of time, quantum theory and the concept of subjectivity, where the radical shift from the exo- to endo-principles is most likely to occur first. More particular topics comprise the puzzling discrepancy between the physical and psychological aspects of time, psychopathology of time, quantum entanglement, separability and non-locality, the status of first-person perspective and the prospect of naturalization of subjectivity, to mention a few. An in-depth interdisciplinary dialogue along these strongly interconnected issues is likely to have a profound impact on the development of natural science and philosophy.

Invited Speaker: Pete Mandik. Phenomenal Consciousness and the Allo/EgoCentric Interface.

I propose a theory of phenomenal consciousness that draws on recent work in both philosophy and neuroscience. I give an account of what is involved in a brain state's being phenomenally conscious with special attention to the subjective properties of phenomenally conscious states. My ultimate goal is to defend the possibility of properties that are both wholly physical yet nonetheless subjective (a goal opposed by various theorists who equate physicality with objectivity). The central idea of the theory I defend is that phenomenally conscious states are representational states in intermediate levels of perceptual processing, where the distinction between lower and higher levels of processing is reconstructed as the distinction between egocentric representations and allocentric representations. Maximally egocentric representations specify the relations of environmental features to the representing subject whereas maximally allocentric representations complete abstract away from relations to the representing subject. I defend the view that conscious representations are hybrid representations that mediate between egocentric and allocentric representations. Subjective properties are the egocentric contents of these hybrid representations.

http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/(en)/ZIF/AG/2005/01-17-Saniga.html

http://www.ta3.sk/~msaniga/ZiF_05/

hydroplane
Originally uploaded by Dr. Smax.

Hydroplane

Shot through my windshield in the rain.

copyright 2005 Pete Mandik

Jombie is real, afterall

Jombie's ontological status has shifted drastically recently, thanks to who made me a real Jombie for x-mas.

made me this awesome scarf, too. How cool is that?* Thank you a bazillion for all the awesome, babe.

* Way cool.

It don't mean a thing if you can't verify string

“String theory emerged in the 1980s as a way to answer questions that still baffle modern physics, such as why is gravity so much weaker than other fundamental forces? By imagining that everything is composed entirely of strings ten billion billion times smaller than atomic nuclei, theoretical physicists were able to create a model of the Universe that unified all fundamental forces into one, and described most of the particles we see today. Unfortunately, these strings are far too small to be detected by even the most powerful particle accelerators. And so, critics say, they are more philosophy than physics.

“Arkani-Hamed's ideas have very little to do with strings themselves. Instead, he is hoping to detect the extra dimensions predicted by the theory, which, like the strings, are thought to be vanishingly small. But in 1998, Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues published calculations showing that some of these extra dimensions might be as large as a millimetre (N. Arkani-Hamed, S. Dimopoulos and G. Dvali Phys. Lett. B 429, 263–272; 1998). Such large dimensions, they argued, have escaped detection because everything we know — except for gravity — is confined to the three dimensions of space and one of time. But gravity, they think, might be able to seep into these extra dimensions. This would explain why it seems so weak to us. And, as a result, unexpected variations in gravity could allow researchers to detect the hidden dimensions.”

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v433/n7021/full/433010a_fs.html

Blastoff:

http://www.petemandik.com/