This is a classic result from psychology. A vivid illustration of confirmation bias. Although I think in the original experiment the rule might have been even more general — just any list of numbers.

That’s maybe not as big as it sounds — it’s a radius of about 6km. Quite possibly nobody lived within that area?

Care to go into a little more detail about the noises NASA are making? There’s not much you can tell from a calm demeanour per se; that’s the proper attitude you’d expect from a professional government organisation in the midst of a crisis. Is there something more substantive than that..?

Forgive me for breaking from the lazy alien jokes, but this is terrible. Nine years the scientific world has been watching this journey, and only a few days from its destination it goes skew-whiff. It’s a maddening nightmare. I can hardly imagine what the atmosphere at headquarters is like right now. Best of luck to…

If you’re so concerned about human emotions, how come you’re being such a cunt?

Are you pretending to be dumb for a joke or are you serious?

A single image of a typeface without this effect applied — to actually demonstrate the optical illusion — would have turned this into a worthwhile article.

Don’t really agree with the premise. The only reason Gage is of historical note in the first place is because he was one of the first demonstrations of localisation of mental functions in the brain. His recovery is not particularly relevant. If you want case studies of brain recovery there’s plenty of them.

Part I and Part II are obviously his son and his father respectively.

“Never boils unless watched” is logically equivalent to “May possibly boil if watched”

That’s not the right way to deal with a “false contingency”. It can’t be unwatched, okay. But we’re only considering the cases were it is unwatched. That is to say, we are considering no cases whatever (unlike the original statement). Therefore the statement holds all of the cases under consideration.

See that all sounds very vague to me and not very entertaining. I didn’t really understand from your comment, what is the point in earning money?

Kinda reminds me of Spore. The devs are staying weirdly quiet over gameplay. Normally that indicates that the thing only looks pretty and sounds cool on paper. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be hyped about.

Yeah... I dunno why the editor seems to want a prequel so badly. It’s obviously not going to be one.

Not trying to be critical for the sake of it, but that really does sound contrived and barely makes sense. It would be kind of ridiculous for all of these adventures to have occurred but somehow be forgotten by the books. Especially as the books explicitly say that his summers are spent doing nothing. And you say…

Sounds very speculative. Their hypothesis comes from a single artist painting in experimental conditions. It sounds like they haven’t actually tried to falsify that hypothesis by performing blind trials on actual known originals and known forgeries.

Confusing quantum teleportation with FTL communication, classic.

Hero.

Doesn’t seem to increase the numbers that significantly to me. You just have a habitable zone around the galactic centre instead of a habitable zone around a star. At the end of the day it’s still just some proportion of the total which are habitable.

There’s less evidence for FTL communication than there is for fairies.