During the first, unconscious stage, our brain processes specific features of objects such as color or shape. It then analyzes these objects with a very high time-resolution. But crucially to the proposed model, there is no actual perception of time during this phase — even time-dependent features such as duration or changes in color are not perceived as such. Time simply becomes a value assigned to each state, just as color or shape. In essence, during this stage your brain gathers and processes data, then puts them into a spreadsheet (a brainxcell if you will,) and “time” becomes just another value in a column.

Reshared post from +Ward Plunet

Computer generates all possible ideas to beat patent trolls

Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim. In his project, called All Prior Art, Reben, an artist and engineer, uses software to rummage through the US patent database, which is freely available online. The software extracts sentences from patent documents and splices them into phrases that describe new inventions. The result is a bizarre array of contraptions that don’t quite make sense. A robotic phone book. A nasal plug adorned with magnetic jewellery. 3D-printed soap that kills pests on strawberry plants. And one of Reben’s favourites – a temperature-regulating adult nappy with a built-in hood.

Reshared post from +Simon Wardley

The robots are coming … for whom the bell tolls.
I often read articles about how machine intelligence and robotics will replace basic roles in society, they will become the new drivers, the new waiters, the new hospital porters and nurses of this world. But is this likely? And if they are going to replace…

I come across so many people on the internet giving advice on how to meet some fitness goal. You know, the ones about how to get rid of tummy fat, get tone arms, etc.

Much of the advice I read sounds plausible.

Pretty much none of it ever includes any scientific evidence, and its infuritating.

Andrew Gelman thinks we should just drastically discount our confidence in the results of any paper published before 2016 because journals are terrible and they will never, ever fix their problems.

Let’s just put a bright line down right now. 2016 is year 1. Everything published before 2016 is provisional. Don’t take publication as meaning much of anything, and just cos a paper’s been cited approvingly, that’s not enough either. You have to read each paper on its own. Anything published in 2015 or earlier is part of the “too big to fail” era, it’s potentially a junk bond supported by toxic loans and you shouldn’t rely on it.

This is based on an an article (http://goo.gl/sYHBKo) that shows just how bad journals are at acknowledging and fixing the problems with published papers.



I mostly avoid discussions about privilege and social justice issues because I find the concepts confusing and I find the sureness with which people talk about them confusing.

However, I stumbled into this nice essay by the best selling author Marti Leimbach on the subject which I found well-written (unsurprisingly), moving, and thought-provoking.

The part that first grabbed me given my above-mentioned confusion on the subject:

Nonetheless, this whole notion of “privilege” vexes me. We talk about it as though we can all recognise what it is. I am not always so sure. I can tell one narrative of my life and it seems to describe someone who grew up without privilege, and I can tell another narrative and it seems almost as though my life was one of ease and privilege from the time I was born.

Lately, I've been keeping statistics on the behavior of people who have appointments to view an apartment or house for rent.

Out of 50 appointments, 32% of the appointments were no-shows, and 29% were 10+ minute late.

Thanks for wasting my time, jerks.

America is increasingly divided not between red states and blue states, but between connected hubs and disconnected backwaters. Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution has pointed out that of America’s 350 major metro areas, the cities with more than three million people have rebounded far better from the financial crisis. Meanwhile, smaller cities like Dayton, Ohio, already floundering, have been falling further behind, as have countless disconnected small towns across the country.

GiveDirectly is doing an experiement with basic income (see here for more explanation about what basic income is: https://goo.gl/LvOrop) wherein they're giving 6000 Kenyans a guaranteed cash flow for 10 years. The amount they're giving seems to basically match what the average income these people are already actually making…$250-$400 per year. 

Nice long form article exploring Laron syndrome which protects the few hundred people with it from cancer and diabetes, and how researchers are mimicking its disease-protection effects via caloric-restriction diets.