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Simulacra and Simulations

August 3, 2010
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As an undergraduate, I helped run a psychology lab for a professor where we did cognitive experiments on Psychology 101 students. My major was Cognitive Science and I spent most of my free time reading anything I could get my hand on the subject. I would read an author’s paper in a journal and flip to their references and then read those papers and flip to those references until I found what seemed to be primary sources – though largely unattributed – it was the philosophers, of course. Carl Jung was among those whose contribution to the field of cognitive science was conveniently buried under tons of footnotes and references.

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You’re Already Dead

July 27, 2010
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I’m not sure how the dream started but I found myself in the middle of a worldwide panic. I think I was watching the news. There was some sort of catastrophe approaching. In my dream it seemed to take the form of an earthquake. I was in a large city and the buildings were collapsing everywhere around us. I was somehow able to jump from building to building. A friend was always there with me but I’m not sure who. I saw another friend and his kids. I tried to get him to leave with me but he said that he needed to stay with his family. A moment later we were all underwater. I was looking for a little girl’s stuffed animal. I found it and gave it to her but it was the wrong one. It belonged to some other kid. She died holding some other kid’s teddy bear. My friend and his family were gone and somehow I moved on to the next place.

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Row Your Boat

July 26, 2010
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There were always those people that amazed me with their clarity of vision for their own futures. I’ve often wondered about those with such a clear vision. They always seemed to know exactly what they wanted – they always had a plan on how to achieve it. I have a sort of admiration for those that have their act together enough to have a vision and a plan to get there. I’m a little jealous.

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Rethinking Inheritance

June 26, 2010
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Something has always troubled me about Darwin’s theory and even modern revisions of his work – there is still no explanation for instinct. Ethologists call instincts innate releasing mechanisms or IRM, which in layman’s terms means “we’ll use big fancy words because we just don’t know.” The most common definition is, “The mechanism by which an organism responds to a key stimulus (KS) with a fixed action pattern (FAP).” Of course, this explains nothing. This is one of the limitations of Darwin’s theory – it always has been. An earlier theory of inheritance was posed by the French zoologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). From Understanding Evolution:

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What Exactly is in a Chicken McNugget?

May 9, 2010
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From The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan:

“The ingredients listed in the flyer suggest a lot of thought goes into a nugget, that and a lot of corn. Of the thirty-eight ingredients it takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn: the corn-fed chicken itself; modified cornstarch (to bind the pulverized chicken meat); mono-, tri-, and diglycerides (emulsifiers, which keep the fats and water from separating); dextrose; lecithin (another emulsifier); chicken broth (to restore some of the flavor that processing leeches out); yellow corn flour and more modified cornstarch (for the batter); cornstarch (a filler); vegetable shortening; partially hydrogenated corn oil; and citric acid as a preservative. A couple of other plants take part in the nugget: There’s some wheat in the batter, and on any given day the hydrogenated oil could come from soybeans, canola, or cotton rather than corn, depending on the market price and availability.

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Evolutionary Theory Needs Revising

March 27, 2010

The story, still sometimes repeated in creationist circles, goes like this: it is the 1960s, at Nasa’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland, and a team of astronomers is using cutting-edge computers to recreate the orbits of the planets, thousands of years in the past. Suddenly, an error message flashes up. There’s a problem: way back in history, one whole day appears to be missing.

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Sita Sings the Blues

March 27, 2010

Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human beings, and even they can’t make their marriage work.

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Tourists Flock to Jesus’s Tomb in Kashmir

March 27, 2010

There is talk of the missing years of Jesus, unmentioned in the gospels, when he was between the ages of 12 and 30. Some say he was in India, picking up Buddhist ideas. These aren’t notions that have entirely died out. The US-based Christian sect, known as the Church Universal and Triumphant, is the best-known modern supporter of the belief that Jesus lived in Kashmir, though they don’t believe he died there.

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