The Tarot Suites and Writing

i think that writing and magic are pretty much synonymous what I am trying to say is that there are certain things which are given as advice to magicians which I would also think would be useful advice for somebody who is aspiring to be a writer these are the four suits of the tarot deck starting from the lowest um that would be discs they represent your ability to deal with the material world the hard physical world that we all exist in so for a writer that means yes pay attention to your ph...

 Grammatical Conventions Delineate Reality

Thus the task of education is to make children fit to live in a society by persuading them to learn and accept its codes-the rules and conventions of communication whereby the society holds itself together. There is first the spoken language. The child is taught to accept "tree" and not "boojum" as the agreed sign for that (pointing to the object). We have no difficulty in understanding that the word "tree" is a matter of convention. What is much less obvious is that convention also governs t...

 Jone's Dilemma

1-48. This principle is named after Reginald Victor Jones, a British professor heavily involved in solving science and technology intelligence challenges. In this deception, the target receives information through multiple means and methods, from many angles, throughout an operational environment. Deception generally becomes more difficult as the number of conduits available to the deception target to confirm the real situation increases. However, the greater the number of conduits that are d...

 Skepticism on Blue Zones

I started getting interested in this topic when I debunked a couple of papers in Nature and Science about extreme ageing in the 2010s. In general, the claims about how long people are living mostly don’t stack up. I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world (the other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only abou...

 Thought Experiment: Living Every Human Life

Imagine living, in order of birth, through the life of every human being who has ever lived.1 Your first life begins about three hundred thousand years ago in Africa.2 After living that life and dying, you travel back in time and are reincarnated as the second-ever person, born slightly later than the first. Once that second person dies, you are reincarnated as the third person, then the fourth, and so on. One hundred billion lives later,3 you become the youngest person alive today. Your “l...

 Games Do Not Model/Simulate, but are a Business

This is how the world appears to game design: There are dependent and independent variables. Designers, through trial and error, will work out which are which. They will choose cultural, business and technical options that maximize long term advantages. If it doesn’t work out, they will do it over. Time is essentially of a piece. It is homogenous, but it can be divided into equivalent units, just like space. Civilization III models not so much ‘civilization’, as the game design business...

 The Science of Wisdom

A bulk of research has already shown that this kind of third-person thinking can temporarily improve decision making. Now a preprint at PsyArxiv finds that it can also bring long-term benefits to thinking and emotional regulation. The researchers said this was ‘the first evidence that wisdom-related cognitive and affective processes can be trained in daily life, and of how to do so’. [...] Grossmann’s aim is to build a strong experimental footing for the study of wisdom,...

 Forgotten Best Sellers

Social values ebb and flow over decades, but the values expressed in a book are fixed. It may be that science fiction is more affected by values dissonance than other genres by nature of being (often) set in the future. A book written and set in the 1950s might have quaint expectations regarding the proper roles of men and women (not to mention the assumption that those are only two choices), but they would be the quaint expectations of the era in which the book is set. A novel written in the...

 Computers are Associated with Precision, but Really They ...

In physics, too, where computers were used to relieve the tedium of data collection and plotting, relatively mundane applications had significant effects. When calculation was automated and its results instantaneously translated into screen visualizations, patterns in data became more apparent. Physics students described feeling “closer to science” and “closer to theory” when their laboratory classes began to use software for visualization and analysis. As in chemistry...

 Anthropocene Traps

The concept of evolutionary traps has been used almost exclusively for studying how non-human species respond to cues in anthropogenic environments [24–34]. Key examples include artificial human lights attracting insects, island species responding naively to the presence of introduced predators, and seabirds not being able to discriminate between the cues of marine plankton and marine plastics [34–36] (figure 1a). In the context of humans, evolutionary mismatch is a much more fr...