Some guys at Intellectual Ventures scrounged up some parts on eBay, and invented a laser mosquito-zapper.
If you can’t drug ’em, fry ’em from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Category: Space & Science
Near Miss
Thankfully, contrary to the fears expressed in my last post, the Copenhagen conference did not finally end up with a substantive deal.
The irony is that most of North America and Europe is experiencing record snowfall and low temperatures.
There is No Soul
Came across some fascinating stuff today in the area of cognitive science.
The first bit is a mention of Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained, in which he puts forward a trenchant argument against dualism: if the soul is to affect the body (i.e. when “I” want to move a part of my body), then it must apply energy to the neurons to change their state. Where does the energy come from? We could put a person in a calorimeter and verify that the energy of heat that they put out is no greater than the energy of the food they consume. A corollary I immediately thought of is: why does thinking (or praying, for that matter) consume a measurable amount of glucose from the blood? Why should a “soulish” activity consume matter?
I have long maintained that whatever is meant by the Biblical terms (e.g. psyche) translated “soul”, it cannot consist of matter or energy, but must consist of information. Dennett’s thought experiment is further support for this view.
The second fascinating item is an Edge talk by Stanislas Dehaene. His research on cognition and consciousness has progressed to the point where it is possible to determine from a real-time brain scan if and at which moment a person becomes consciously aware of a stimulus.
I’ve recently been reading Sydney Lamb’s work in neurocognitive linguistics; Dehaene’s work seems to tie in nicely.
I shall be interested to read his papers on the cognition of number and compare with Dan Everett‘s work with the Pirahã, whom he claims do not use numbers.
Smoking Gun
People with more time on their hands than me have been poring over the source code in the leaked CRU files. Here is a snippet of IDL code that produces a graph showing temperature data for the twentieth century (osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro):
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=1*0.75 ; fudge factor
if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
;
yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
That long string of numbers with some negative values in the middle and positive values at the end? Those numbers are multiplied by the real temperatures to hide a warm period in the 1940s, and exaggerate the temperatures at the end of the century.
This is scientific fraud, pure and simple.
- ,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,-0.1,0.3,0.8, 1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6,2.6 ↩