The Contradiction of Awe
Humans are so contradictory. Yesterday, I looked out the window of the building I work in, one of the tallest buildings in the Philadelphia skyline, and I felt a tremendous […]
Category Archives: Science & Nature
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Pluto, Lovecraft, & the ‘REAL’ Reason Behind Cosmos
OK… OK… Hear me out on this one: Neil DeGrasse Tyson is an alien, or at very least working for an alien race known as the Mi-go who are described […]
Meeting The Mayans: Applied Sentience Goes to Mexico
Getting There The road from Cancun to Chichen Itza—home of El Castillo, one of the New Seven Wonders of the World—is not made of dirt; it is not dilapidated, pot-hole ridden, […]
The 6 Ways Altruism Could Have Evolved: Part 2, Commitment & Sex
In my first post in this three part series I focused on the first 2 of 6 ways – reciprocity and kin selection – that evolution by natural selection without […]
Popular Science is Garbage… and Math is To Blame
The holy grail of amateur linguistics is the construction of a language which is both “maximally precise” and “maximally concise”—in other words, packing more information into fewer symbols; in other, other words, […]
The 6 Ways Altruism Could Have Evolved: Part 1, Kinship & Reciprocity
I’m getting pretty tired of hearing Ayn Rand fanatics, economics undergrads and those who misinterpret the ‘selfish’ gene talk about how egoistic the human race is and how the existence of […]
Why Shark Week is Now Utter ‘Bull Shark’: A Shark Lover’s Frustration with the Latest TV Sell Out
By John Artenstein, “The torso has been severed in mid-thorax. There are no major organs remaining…The right arm has been severed above the elbow with massive tissue loss in the […]
The Months, The Weeks, The Old Nile Speaks: A History of Time
What is the greatest human discovery or invention of all time? Which idea has most changed the way we understand the universe? Which single concept provided the base pavement for […]
Methodological Mind Games: Is Behaviorism Ever Valid ?
The year is 1905 and you are sitting in a Swiss patent office, restlessly waiting to learn if your first electromagnetic contraption has finally been awarded copyright. The patience-o-meter situated […]
The Housewarming Party: A Parable of Algorithms, Heuristics, and Behavioral Economics
Imagine that you—a 22-year-old, freshly graduated, puffed-up and proper psychology major—have just been hired at a rapidly expanding tech company in Arizona. Despite having all the relevant technological know-how, you […]
Applied Sentience 