Today I Learned

Touched by His Noodly Appendage, parody of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, via Wikipedia.org Reactions to the above image range from religious ecstasy to abject horror. I find it amusing and interesting, so I guess I’m somewhere in the middle. The Flying Spaghetti Monster was, according to the consensus of scholarly opinion, a satire on creationism, created by Bobby Henderson, a physics graduate at Oregon State University. It was first published as an open letter to the Kans

Louis Armstrong, via Wikimedia Commons Louis Armstrong was one of the truly great musicians, and What a Wonderful World is one of the truly great songs. To get just a hint of his influence, have a look at his discography. Section 1 consists of releases on 78 and 45 rpm, released between 1923 (before either of my parents were born) and 1970 (when I was a toddler), while section 2 consists of LPs and EPs, released between 1944 and 1971. Absolutely unbelievable, and if you think

Artificial Intelligence, via Wikimedia Commons NOTE: An edited version of this article appeared on The Skeptic (UK). We live in a sea of cognitive biases. Everyone is affected. All of us. All the time. Psychologists study them, as do economists, cognitive scientists, and philosophers, but no one is immune to them. Skeptics need to understand them, and I suspect that most are able to rattle off a list as easily as they can a list of logical fallacies. It is essential, however,

Scutum – Roman shield This is a shield. Not the one I wanted to show, but a shield nevertheless. I actually wanted to show an image of the coat of arms of Canada, even though it was created long after the point at which it might reasonably have been placed on an actual shield, but I stopped when I found a notice on the Governor General’s website stating that the heraldic emblems may not be reproduced without written consent. (I strongly suspect that my using that image would

Cover of The Shockwave Rider, by John Brunner, 1975 I sometimes hear references to one “futurist” or another, making pronouncements regarding current trends and where they may lead, and I must confess that I have been unimpressed. My impression is that this area of study is still in its infancy, so the level of scientific rigour applied to the work ranges wildly. Sometimes, I see the incremental analysis of trends and cautious suggestions of possible hypotheses for future res

Appointing incompetent loyalists, via Wikimedia Commons I’d really like to describe the Trump administration as an example of Weaponized Incompetence, but I really can’t. Intuitively, the term seems to fit, but it already has a definition in the psychological literature. Setting Trump aside for the moment, the term refers to strategically avoiding responsibility by pretending to be incapable so that someone else helps, takes over, or stops delegating tasks. Over time, the per

“Beware of the Leopard”, from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, via Wikimedia Commons In the classic scene from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (I refer, of course, to the 1981 TV version), Arthur Dent confronts the person trying to bulldoze his house, who explains that the plans for the demolition had been placed on display. “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar.” “That’s the display department.” “With a torch.” “The lights had probably gone.” “So had t

Da Vinci sketch of the human brain and skull (c. 1510), via Wikimedia.org NOTE: An edited version of this article appeared on The Skeptic (UK). “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Winston Churchill, 11-Nov-1947 The term “neurodiversity” has been used in recent years to describe the natural variations in human neurolo

Bubbles, from Finding Nemo, via YouTube.com Finding Nemo was a great film, filled with endless references, sight-gags, and characters, making it the sort of movie you can watch again and again. Among the wonderful scenes is one with Bubbles (voiced by Stephen Root), who gets a bit... excited when he sees bubbles. As Gill says, “Fish aren’t meant to be in a box, kid. It does things to you.” But why would people be thinking so much about bubbles? It’s not as if we’re in the mid

Bronze coin of Pontius Pilate, Procurator of Judaea © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence. dixit itaque ei Pilatus ergo rex es tu respondit Iesus tu dicis quia rex sum ego ego in hoc natus sum et ad hoc veni in mundum ut testimonium perhibeam veritati omnis qui est ex veritate audit meam vocem dicit ei Pilatus quid est veritas et cum hoc dixisset iterum exivit ad I

til-technology.com When we hear music, there’s usually a go-to association, which can say a lot about the listener. Take, for example, Wagner’s famous Ride of the Valkyries, from Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung). While I have heard it many times (in isolation, as I have never actually listened to a Wagner opera in its entirety), the version that my mind always goes to is the one in What’s Opera, Doc?, with the famous lines: “Kill da wabbit! Kill da wabbit! K

Alan Turing, 1951, via Wikipedia.org It’s been over seventy-five years since Alan Turing came up with the Imitation Game in his 1950 paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, and I have previously written written about the Turing Test. After so many years, and so much work on Artificial Intelligence, there is a lot of criticism of the test, and discussion of how to beat it, and systems which can now “beat” it, but not much on what comes next. Does beating the Turing test m