Last spring, I was eating dinner in a semi-fancy restaurant that incongruously had flat screen TVs playing news in the corner. (This is very Dallas, by the way.) My taste for food faded as I saw a commercial for Japanese Foot Pads which reportedly sucked various toxins from your feet while sleeping. It was both gross and grossly implausible. Here’s the ad:
Recently, All Things Considered on NPR (or, as my wife affectionately calls it, “the nipper”) had a feature that pretty conclusively unveiled the sham. Listen here as Sarah Varney blackens her soles for science. I still see these things in stores. More evidence that people are idiots.
One of the more interesting arguments for the existence of God claims that our universe is “finely tuned” so that life will emerge. In other words, with only slight variations in the physical constants the universe could not bear life, and the best way to explain the aptness of this universe is that the constants were set by an entity that wished for life to emerge. There are problems with the argument, of course, but the basic empirical premise is usually accepted–that the conditions under which a universe would bear life are rare. An interesting result to be published in The Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, however, questions that.
Fred Adams at The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor maintains that the appearance of fine tuning is illusory. While it is perhaps true, Adams says, that if you fiddle with just a single characteristic of the universe it would no longer be apt for life, it does not follow that if you generated a host of settings randomly that the resulting universes would only rarely allow for life. When Adams ran a computer model of such a test, however, about a quarter of the universes included stars that result in some sort of life. Thus, even the empirical premise of the fine-tuning argument is substantially undermined.
Read more at The New Scientist.
A very good weekly review has started appearing at Wired Science. Two of their editors take a look at the most Digged science articles and review them based on merits. It’s good to see some intellectual standards on the web.
This week’s is here.
A cognitive scientist wants to employ M.C. Escher’s bag of optical tricks to get your eyes to solve logic problems.
More specifically, Mark Changizi, a former Caltech fellow and current cognitive science professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute suggests that human beings can use their brain’s visual-processing abilities to solve LSAT-style logic puzzles, simply by staring at images designed to get their eyes to compute. Because this form of visual processing feels so effortless, such problems might be much easier to solve than their written counterparts.
Read the rest at Wired.
