"Found out my grandmother died by reading Twitter."
-- patrissimo

I have to pick up another semester of Humanities in order to satisfy my new degree requirements. Of the three courses that tickled my fancy -- an archaeology class covering the Mediterranean region from the Upper Paleolithic to Byzantium, philosophy of art, and metaphysics (in that order) -- the latter was the only one I could force into my ( Read more... )

This here has got to be the most gloriously confusing op-ed I've read in a long while (via simonoff). I mean, let's just look at the by-line for a start: it's as if Paul Wolfowitz and Jeffrey Sachs managed to set aside their differences and team up with Bill Gates to advocate micro-lending as a solution to third world poverty. Three people of disparate ( Read more... )

I'm interested in cryptic cognitive variation -- basically weird cognitive syndromes that aren't debilitating or obvious enough to land someone in a clinic and thus go under-reported. Fun figure: according to Kennerknecht et al (2006), about 1 in 50 people in the European population is estimated to have congenital prosopagnosia (CP) -- an inability ( Read more... )

So I'm sitting here typing away and suddenly realize there's a praying mantis crawling up the side of my laptop. Whatever could this portend?