The Daily Sabbatical
Music, Books, and Assorted Maunderings

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.
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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… Read More

Interesting result found on Scientific Blogging about how younger people are more susceptible to a common form of fallacious reasoning.  Young people are more likely to keep watching a bad movie if they've paid for it than if it was free.  Old people are as inclined or disinclined to keep watching whether they've paid or not.  Interesting, for sure.  The oldies come out as more rational.  I'm not sure I agree with the psychologist's reasoning about the source of the disparity between young and old,… Read More

Dawkins can certainly get tiresome, but this conversation with Nobel Prize winning physicist Steven Weinberg (at the University of Texas, by the way) is quite good.  It provides the simple reason why design and fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, even on their best days, get you nowhere.  Read More