thinkness - monkey vs robot Archives

"monkey vs robot" archive

Addition through subtraction - Hey, this is the most interesting article thinkness has seen since... well, that thing about money yesterday. This research shows that when rats consume artificial sweetener is throws their natural eating-tasting-satiety system all out of whack and they end up... Posted in monkey vs robot | 0 Trackbacks | 351 Comments

Lose the disgust - thinkness picked up on the debate over the usefulness of disgust a couple of months ago. Now psychologists Paul Bloom jumps into the fray and says we should be over disgust (it was so hundreds of years ago). The incidents... Posted in monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 0 Trackbacks | 218 Comments

Intuition? Feh. - I was looking at the IMDB entry for The Fog of War and came across this snippet from a user review: My first encounter with Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara was in the late spring of 1966 when, as... Posted in monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 6 Trackbacks | 317 Comments

Bushcorp vs reality - If you read both thinkness and The New Republic, you might think I sort of cribbed my previous post from their recent article, Closing of the Presidential Mind, but I assure you it's not the case. I think the article... Posted in monkey vs robot , political currents | 0 Trackbacks | 136 Comments

Disgusting monkey morality - A very interesting article by John Wilson in the Globe Ideas section looks at the benefits and costs of the feeling of disgust. William Ian Miller defends the morality of the emotion: Disgust is quite fallible as a moral guide,... Posted in color , language , monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 1 Trackbacks | 66 Comments

Nature of the beast - Former Harvard Professor Christian Schwabe has a whole different idea about how evolution works, though he can't get any folks in the mainstream science world to even give it a look. His "genomic potential hypothesis" is "the idea that life... Posted in evolution , monkey vs robot | 5 Trackbacks | 106 Comments

The Good Life - Wow, this is a really interesting essay written by Martin Seligman, the president of the American Psychological Association. So much of interest in here; it'll take me a while to internalize much of it. Some good points: - I'm pretty... Posted in monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 4 Trackbacks | 91 Comments

Smell is the biggest and best - People overlook the importance of smell at their own risk. We may be predominantly visual/verbal creatures, but smell connects our big cortexes with our most animalistic insides. Never forget... Oh, and I have specifics for you, kind reader. Fear not!... Posted in evolution , monkey vs robot | 0 Trackbacks | 233 Comments

Plato, Aristotle; abstract, concrete; digital, analog; monkey, robot - thinkness thinks all the time about differences between abstract and concrete existence. (It first came up overtly in a post about the difference between the 'technical' information contained in a recipe and the 'practical' information stored in a cook's brain.)... Posted in monkey vs robot | 11 Trackbacks | 137 Comments

Color -- animatronic Lincoln - That's the whole quote right there. It's in reference to John Kerry [who happily points out that his initials are JFK], from Mickey Kaus via Michael Kinsley's latest Slate column. I love animatronics -- there's something so spellbinding about those... Posted in language , monkey vs robot | 8 Trackbacks | 146 Comments

Dewey or doney love me? - So mindtangle has an anecdote relating to that great passage from Eugenides' Middlesex: 'I randomly ran across a book in Thailand whose cover promised to help me "transcend the boundaries of language." Well, it ended up being a self-help book,... Posted in monkey vs robot | 8 Trackbacks | 211 Comments

[Middle]sex specific - Okay, it didn't take long before I got the missing section of Middlesex beamed to me by a lovely friend in lovely Wisconsin. [Hopefully I'll get some cheese curds beamed next.] The punctuation may be a little off, but the... Posted in monkey vs robot | 3 Trackbacks | 163 Comments
But the words got in the way - My brother recently read me a great passage from Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, which relates to this whole question of abstractness. In this section he talks about how he [I don't know if this is a character or a narrating voice... Posted in monkey vs robot | 13 Trackbacks | 199 Comments
Appreciation of the analog - David Brooks wrote an interesting, completely misguided op-ed about how Iraq is actually going well, because it's muddling through the complicated process of making a democracy. [Talkingpointsmemo, as one would expect, has the lucid take-down: 'The failure to do proper... Posted in monkey vs robot | 9 Trackbacks | 156 Comments

Puddin' - 'The proof is in the puddin' -- one of my favorite phrases of all-time. I'm going to immediately start getting into some of the ideas I want to steer toward in this new incarnation of thinkness, so as to show... Posted in language , monkey vs robot , psychology & consciousness | 7 Trackbacks | 166 Comments

Stranger than 'truth is stranger than fiction' - From a June, 2002 Discover magazine article about uninformed science popping up in media: 'Plait isn't out to lecture. His goal is to demonstrate that reality is actually more interesting than make-believe.' And you know what else? The Easter Bunny... Posted in monkey vs robot | 1 Trackbacks | 118 Comments

Slated for destruction - I like Slate, but this is the stupidest article I've read in a really long time. Mock trials to distribute money to smart jurors? Fining jurors who are proven wrong? Can we just fine bad columnists instead? Maybe I should... Posted in monkey vs robot | 0 Trackbacks | 394 Comments