Clever References to Critical Theory

Really it is entirely about story, though not in any sense that any of you seem familiar with. Do you know nothing of narratology? Where is Derridean "play" and excessiveness? Foucauldian limit-attitude? Lyotardian language-games? Lacanian Imaginaries? Where is the commitment to praxis, positioning Jamesonian nostalgia, and despair as well as Habermasian fears of irrationalism as panic discourses signaling the defeat of Enlightenment hegemony over cultural theory? But no: discourses on this s...

 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...

 Identifying AI Online

Before you continue, pause and consider: How would you prove you're not a language model generating predictive text? What special human tricks can you do that a language model can't? 1. Triangulate objective reality [...] This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the je ne sais quoi of being alive. Language models can decently mim...

 Sex Makes Life and Should Not Be Shunned

If there is a perverse man who could take offense at the praise that I give to the most noble and universal of passions, I would evoke Nature before him, I would make it speak, and Nature would say to him: why do you blush to hear the word pleasure pronounced, when you do not blush to indulge in its temptations under the cover of night? Are you ignorant of its purpose and of what you owe it? Do you believe that your mother would have imperiled her life to give you yours if I had not attached ...

 Exercise Meaningful in Having Good Mental Health

In this cross-sectional study, we analysed data from 1 237 194 people aged 18 years or older in the USA from the 2011, 2013, and 2015 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Behavioral Risk Factors Surveillance System survey. We compared the number of days of bad self-reported mental health between individuals who exercised and those who did not, using an exact non-parametric matching procedure to balance the two groups in terms of age, race, gender, marital status, income, education l...

 Kayfabe

Although the etymology of the word is a matter of debate, for at least 50 years “kayfabe” has referred to the unspoken contract between wrestlers and spectators: We’ll present you something clearly fake under the insistence that it’s real, and you will experience genuine emotion. Neither party acknowledges the bargain, or else the magic is ruined. [...] The aesthetic of World Wrestling Entertainment seems to be spreading from the ring to the world stage. Ask an average Trump support...

 Heritable IQ is Boosted by Environment, Just Like Height

hough it’s not easy to pinpoint the causes of the rise in IQ scores, it’s no paradox that a heritable trait can be boosted by changes in the environment. That’s what happened with height, a trait that also is highly heritable and has increased over the decades, and for some of the same reasons: better nutrition and less disease. Brains are greedy organs, consuming about a fifth of the body’s energy, and they are made of fats and proteins that are demanding for the body to produce. Fig...

 Lower Mortality in Moderate Drinkers VS Abstainers Result...

RESULTS: Without adjustment, meta-analysis of all 87 included studies replicated the classic J-shaped curve, with low-volume drinkers (1.3-24.9 g ethanol per day) having reduced mortality risk (RR = 0.86, 95% CI [0.83, 0.90]). Occasional drinkers (<1.3 g per day) had similar mortality risk (RR = 0.84, 95% CI [0.79, 0.89]), and former drinkers had elevated risk (RR = 1.22, 95% CI [1.14, 1.31]). After adjustment for abstainer biases and quality-related study characteristics, no significant r...

 Health Concerns Spark Adult Interest in Science

Beginning in middle age and continuing through later adulthood, individuals are often motivated by events in their own lives or the lives of significant others to obtain health-related information.^^ Health-related concerns draw many adults into a new domain of science learning. At the same time, with retirement, older adults have more time to devote to personal interests. Their science learnmg addresses long-standing scientific interests as well as new areas of interest.^^ Adults differ fr...

 Evolutionary History Through Macro and Micro Observations

Everything in the cosmos has a history. The old dichotomy between the "historical" sciences (like geology, paleontology and evolutionary biology) and the (for want of a better term) "functional" sciences (like physics and chemistry—some would call them the "real sciences") was always supposed to be that fields like physics study dynamic processes and discover immutable laws of interaction among particles composing the cosmos—while the historical sciences study, well, history—the suppose...