Someone's got issues with Web 2.0 - hell, with Web 1.0: Of all the misguided schemes put forth lately to save newspapers (micropayments! blame Google!), the one put forth by Judge Richard Posner has…

Two hundred million years ago, Washington was two large islands, bits of continent on the move westward, eventually bumping up against the North American continent and calling it home. Even with…

As we saw in the previous posts, Part 1 and Part 2,many animals have the ability to abstract concepts and to abstract solutions to various problems. So what’s left? I am going to postulate that what…

The Meaning Of Tolerance Tolerance, the ability to 'live with' or 'put up with' something has wide-ranging applications in engineering, and is strongly parallel to the notion of error bars1 in…

From Prof. Chad Orzel's Graduation Speech: Science isn't a body of facts, science is a process for figuring out how the world works: you see something interesting, come up with an idea of why that…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #8 Quistic grammar is a predominantly semantic grammar based on the observation that any statement in human language can be re-phrased as one or more simple…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #7 Quistic grammar is a predominantly semantic grammar based on the observation that any statement in human language can be re-phrased as one or more simple…

What happens when the pet owners refuse to take the responsibility of the animals litter? They are either turned outdoors as strays or sold back to the pet dealers and puppy mills where they are…

Jeffery Dach, MD claims that this argument is persuasive: Since every man on the street knows that the computer code that runs a program requires  intelligence for its origin, it…

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced some of the basic concepts and steps associated with the development of cognition and how more and more sophisticated responses to problems may have emerged in…

Having been inspired by a series of articles by Becky Jungbauer, I thought it might be useful to explore the basic concept of intelligence and its possible origins. Any creature which has sensory…

NASA watch seems to have been first in noticing the way-cool Star-Trek Style NASA poster, cheerfully shown here in all its glory.  Yes, this is not your parent's NASA... no, wait, it is. …

Good day, bad day, in between - this 1 minute video will put a smile on your face. An elderly couple walked in to the Mayo Clinic lobby, saw a piano, and played an impromptu duet. The man, who is…

A Science Of Human Language - Part #6 : Quistic Grammar Part #1 of this series outlines the need for an inclusive theory of language based in science.  Part #2 was an overview of the use of…

Antonio Egas Moniz was nominated for his contribution to science , the lobotomy. He wouldn't be my first or last pick for such a prestigious honor and apparently others feel the same way. In a case…

In a tale of time traveler gone bad, amateur dinosaur hunter, Nathan Murphy, the fellow who found the famous duck-billed dinosaur Leonardo in the burnt-umber badlands of Montana’s Hell Creek back in…

Antonio Egas Moniz was nominated for his contribution to science , the lobotomy. He wouldn't be my first or last pick for such a prestigious honor and apparently others feel the same way. In a case…

The world doesn't always make sense. Witness Mike's blog post on some convoluted language in a news story. I understand that people make mistakes - I do all the time. My personal philosophy is…

The man who stopped smoking is the title of a video from the British Medical Journal (BMJ).  The blurb says: Richard Doll was a luminary of clinical research whose case control study, published…

By honest I don't mean that you only tell what's true. But you make clear the entire situation. You make clear all the information that is required for somebody else who is intelligent to make up…