Last night I got into another discussion with someone who believes in the Martingale betting system, and then sat down and ran numbers for a while. I think I understand it better than when I wrote about it before. What the Martingale system does is concentrate risk ( Read more... )

I was just looking at a brief article about H.M., the famous patient with anterograde amnesia. He lost the ability to form new long-term memories in 1953, following radical neurosurgery to control a life-threatening case of epilepsy. He died last year at the age of 82, after spending over fifty years being scrutinized by a variety of ( Read more... )

Cammila commented on my post about Lie to Me that the thing about smiling with your eyes isn't exactly esoteric knowledge. Heck, you can even feel the difference. When I make myself smile and crinkle my eyes, I get a feeling of genuine mirth. When I make myself pull my lips back without the eyes, I feel like I'm either very uncomfortable or trying ( Read more... )

I watched the first episode of Lie to Me, the new detective show based on facial analysis. The folks who made it clearly spent some time with Paul Ekman or Erika Rosenberg or one of those crowd. They're using real AUs (action units, the atomic components of facial expressions). Some of their facts about emotions and microexpressions seem to be true ( Read more... )

wisn showed me this post from a linguistics blog that does a close reading of the confusion in the Obama / Roberts oath of office. I'm not educated enough to follow their specific inferences, but I find it fascinating and beautiful to get a look at the intricate, multimodal dance of communication and accommodation that underlies every little ( Read more... )

Well, I just figured something out. It wasn't exactly rocket science but I've been thinking about these ideas for a long time and only recently realized they were superficially in conflict. (implied: so I'm going to blog about them, but don't think I'm either silly or arrogant for believing that this is some kind of big news ( Read more... )

A lot of you have heard me say that when I was a teenager, I had recurring episodes of sleep paralysis (and now all of you have!). I got the complete "old hag" package, with full-sensory hallucinations and feelings of suffocation and terror. After the first couple of years I finally figured out what was happening to me, when I recognized it in a ( Read more... )

Yesterday I had one of those breakthrough spam episodes, where a new algorithm got about 75 spam messages through my filter within a few minutes. These did a really good job of worrying me, with subjects like "I've been trying to reach you all day!" and "I'm freezing, where are you??" But then there's this:


( Read more... )

Another aspect of Kingdom of Loathing I find interesting is the Money Making Game (the name is a shout-out to the original Legend of Zelda, which most players are probably too young to remember... o_O). A player publicly posts a wager of any amount, another player takes it, and the game randomly decides who wins. The winner gets all the meat (money ( Read more... )

I have a number of friends with personally iconic tattoos, and all of them (that I can think of) have at least one on their backs. That interests me because it's not a decision I would make. When I decided to get my slime tattoo, I knew right away that I wanted it to be someplace I'd see it every day (and after that it was easy to decide it went on ( Read more... )