I tend to think (in line with the study) that social networking sites are a way of restoring a sense of community that we no longer have in a mobile, urban society. In a small community, relationships are mediated by practical activities, gossip, visual contact, superficial interaction, etc. It seems that all the…

The usual way of explaining the target effect that one would like to achieve with these drugs is by differentiating a post-traumatic reaction to an event and the absence of such a response. If a post-traumatic response occurs, the memory of the event is "laid down" differently, which leads to "re-living" the event…

Don't mess with the bull, young man. You'll get the horns.

If it actually worked, after you stopped flying through the air and hit the ground at high velocity.

I imagine he was just working on this as an exercise, since he didn't want to publish it.

@Cam Newton's Broken Laptop

I read an article very recently about how the "locally sourced" meat trend in California is very much limited by the steadily declining numbers of slaughterhouses in the state. Evidently, the workload for slaughterhouses is primarily seasonal, making it difficult for small slaughterhouses to stay afloat. As a…

One well known objection to the proof of the existence of God via the idea of necessary existence is that existence is not a predicate. In other words, the two statements, "X is blue" and "X exists" (or "X is existing"), appear to be similar in structure but actually are not the same kind of statement. (I think Kant…

I think the best thing the U.S. could do at this point would be to send rovers to the moon. We have a lot of experience from the Mars rovers that no other nation has, and lunar rovers should be exponentially easier to operate and more scientifically revealing than the Mars rovers. The second step would involve…

I agree with you completely (from my own understanding of what has been discovered so far). The main thing to determine is the relative cost for extracting a given amount of water from the moon compared to the cost of moving the same quantity of water from the Earth to the moon. And that ratio will be dependent on…

The casting highlights for me so far are Nicholas Hoult and Kevin Bacon.

I enjoyed Chronicles but remember thinking that, while the final scene was effectively dramatic, it ended in a kind of awkward spot, if there was a sequel. I really hope this sequel gets made and takes the character in another direction.

I'm actually really wondering what he had in mind when he wrote, "a true R rated film." The usual logic is to shoot the film, edit out as little as you can get away with to get the PG-13 rating, and release a director's cut on BR/DVD. So I'm curious about what in particular he thinks gets lost in that process.

What was interesting about that Scientific American article is that it exposed a bias towards cultural development; that is, a bias towards abstract thinking over practical thinking. And the example he raised, regarding the definition of a dog, also was a way of indicating that the paradigms used to differentiate…

The results of this study fall in line with the Kantian distinction between discursive understanding and intuition. The former is associated with language and logic, the latter with the ability to form images (through the activity of the productive imagination). The two areas are supposed to be "mutually…

I've read that this dialogue is considered to be idiosyncratic and troubling for interpreters, because the slave boy demonstrates no convincing understanding of the geometrical problem at all, but Socrates seems to completely gloss over that part.

The desire for survival runs deeper than the desire for individuation. And a hierarchy is a general requirement of survival - that is, in situations where the survival of a community is at stake. If people have to choose between the two, most will be satisfied to live within a hierarchy even if it is oppressive. So…

I thought Peter and Gwen would just sit there and trade quips and sip coffee and listen to The Smiths for the entire movie.

It will lead naturally into 25 sequels and a spin-off television series about the counting numbers.

That sounds good, but I would make it a five year study. It will take us a while to acquire the necessary sample size of subjects and to allow them to apply for more federal grants while clenching and not clenching their teeth. Each of their review processes will in themselves take about three years.