Or is the concept of a mechanistic universe just philosophical masturbation? — Suppose you were hungry, so you go to your kitchen and see a banana and an apple. Which do you choose? According to Sam Harris in a podcast on the topic, you don’t have a choice. You feel like you do, but, you don’t. Because, Harris says, the universe is…

It’s not just about gaining weight — I’m not a doctor, and a personal anecdote doesn’t make for robust scientific proof, but, I feel like I’ve seen for myself the possible downside of an excess of fructose. So, I think it is actually worse than other sugars. Maybe. You’ve probably heard of “high fructose corn syrup,” and…

Artificial sweeteners are where belief and science collide — Last week, the World Health Organization, released a statement saying that aspartame has a “possible” link to cancer. I heard about this via YouTube, where the algorithm seems to have determined that I really wanted to know about it, because I was served a whole bunch of videos on the…

A fresh enough take on post apocalyptic premises — (Spoiler level: very mild. I talk about some specific events, but I’ve tried to not say anything that I think would spoil the big reveal at the end. …

The essay I should have written in art school — I was talking with a friend who recently went to Paris, and while she was there, she went to see the Mona Lisa. The experience as she described it was pretty close to when I went to see Edward Munch’s The Scream when it was exhibited in Tokyo. There’s a…

And Maybe For the Better — If you told me the latest season of The Mandalorian was written by ChatGPT, I would believe you. I’m sure it almost certainly wasn’t, but, the TL;DR of this article is that large language models, as well as similar programs that generate images, are basically doing what corporations do. …

If we stick a silhouette of a cat on the wall, and a real cat comes in the room and hisses at it, we think, “Silly cat. Its brain is too primitive to discern between reality and simulation.” But when we build an AI that makes us feel like we’re…

Rudyard Kipling would be proud — Note: This is a thing I wrote in January of 2010, just after the first Avatar movie came out. Originally I posted it on my personal web site, which was a blog site back when people had individual web sites with blogs. …

Black Panther, My Rambling Review — One of the the things I liked best about Black Panther is that it had a very compelling villain. Part of me was kind of rooting for Killmonger, because he made a decent case for his side of things. …