This is a quote from YouTuber Emma Thorne in her video Evangelical Conspiracy Movie: Trump 2024 Recap, referring to the United States. Thorne herself is from the UK. Main character syndrome is an informal, nonscientific term to describe someone who thinks of their life like a story in which they are the main character. In…
Category: Society
Where credit is due
Over time, I have become increasingly opposed to the idea of intellectual property. It is something I have been thinking about for a while, but recent open questions related to generative AI have brought this to the forefront of my mind. In particular, what I have been thinking about recently is that what copyright law…
The legend of Alfred Nobel
Alfred Nobel was a Swedish chemist who is famous for two things: inventing dynamite and establishing the Nobel Prize. Nobel observed that nitroglycerin, an explosive available at the time, was too volatile to handle safely and caused many accidental deaths. He discovered that by getting nitroglycerin to soak into diatomaceous earth (a kind of fine…
Stories in ludology & narratology (part 2)
In Part 1, we discussed the origin of play, the relationship between game mechanics and interactive narrative, and the specific examples of Tetris and Monopoly. In this post, we’ll take a look at what happens when gameplay and narrative clash, what can be done to avoid it, and how it can be used to the…
Stop viewing animals as good or bad
I recently learned that opossums can carry a parasite that can cause serious injury to horses. When looking into it, I also discovered opossums might not eat nearly as many ticks as previously thought. My heart sank reading all this. I previously viewed opossums as a kind of superhero animal, cleaning up the bad stuff…
Creationism and conspiracy
YEC is a massive conspiracy theory Young earth creationism (YEC) seems at first like a straightforward denial of science. One might say that young earth creationists believe scientists are wrong about the age of the universe, the age of the earth, biological evolution, and so on. Here’s the thing: if they are so wrong, what…
Don’t be a ruminant
The suborder Ruminantia includes nearly 200 extant species in six families (Tragulidae, Giraffidae, Antilocapridae, Moschidae, Cervidae, and Bovidae), and is the most important group of large terrestrial herbivorous mammals. Hernández Fernández and Vrba 2005, p. 270 Ruminants are a cosmopolitan group of even-toed ungulates (artiodactyls). They are often distinguished from other large herbivorous mammals by…
AI as an archive of human language
This is a fascinating example of an application of AI. The current discourse around AI can be pretty negative as many of the downsides are apparent and widespread. However, AI has many good uses as well. Like any technology, its effect on the world depends on its user. We are in a period of mass…
Organic almonds and climate change denial: the modern conspiracy crowd
NaturalNews.com is one of the strangest sites I’ve come across. Thinking about it more, however, it’s not very strange at all. This is the state of the modern conspiracy crowd. I used to think that, when it came to people like antivaxxers, there was a tenuous alliance between left-wing New Age types and right-wing traditionalist…
thoughts on mind 