Seven amazing things we take for granted most of the time, ordered from least to most weird

February 19, 2021

1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we've been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this. 2. Popcorn. It's freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it's delicious. 3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s. This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it w...

Some Things Are Only In Your Simulation

July 28, 2011

It is impossible to perceive anything directly. What we experience as a visual image starts out as electromagnetic radiation of various frequencies which reflects off of an object and then hits our eye. The photoreceptor cells in our eye are stimulated, information propagates down the optic nerve, and so forth. We usually interpret this as seeing the object we are looking at. However, a more complete description involves acknowledging that we live in a simulation constructed by our brain. Our ey...