I am a rock

What does it mean to be conscious? "Experience is information from the inside; physics is information from the outside," says David Chalmers.

See this somewhat once-over-lightly article from the New York Times.

Giving New Meaning to the Word "Stoplight"

If you don't immediately think "transporter" upon reading this teaser of an article in Wired, I despair for your imagination. This kind of thing is precisely why I wish I had some math aptitude, so I could drop everything and be an atomic physicist.

The Problem with Beauty

A fascinating and clear analysis of the pitfalls of a culture obsessed with physical beauty: Why I Hate Beauty.

The article probably won't tell you anything you don't already know, but provides some useful constructs that could be applied to other categories as well. It also serves as a useful foundation for arguments about the vital importance of a cultural (or counter-cultural!) context for providing a balance of values.

Where are you on the curve?

Once again confirming how very marginal I am in my community...

Check out this absolutely fascinating look at your neighborhood through the lens of the census and other data: Zipcodestats. An amazing wealth of detail is available on all sorts of demographic information.

Faceblind

This article in Wired, about people who are developmentally incapable of recognizing faces (a condition previously thought only to occur in victims of brain damage) is fascinating. The best guess of these researchers is that two percent of the population is faceblind....

It's hard for me to imagine what a challenge it must be to go through life this way. If you, or someone you know, has a really hard time recognizing people, point them to faceblind.org.

We are all made of stars...

A recent study shows that human hands (and the soles of our feet, and our foreheads) emit photons. Read more about it here.

I'll try to keep that in mind as I juggle writing one of four papers for my NT Gospels class (due tomorrow), my brother's visit, and the paying work I'm not doing.

Gah.