Killer Whales are super rad fyi, here's an old but cool article talking about how galaxy brained they are compared to pretty much any other animal apart from us.
Yeah cephalopods are also some of my fave animals, feels bad for octpuses being that smart but living such short lives since they mate once and then die.
Luckily orcas have no such problem so go go intergenerational transfer of learnt behaviours.
"Let me tell you, when yung Rouj had his Senna and Mansell Scalextric, Frank was the goddamn Professor X of F1."
This is great and really interesting. He talks about research using VR to understand and treat phobias, how to optimise performance of cognition, psychedelics, how the vision system works, layers of abstraction and consciousness.
Particularly fascinating is a description of a practical demonstration that we are constructing our percieved reality, and that it doesn't have to have anything to do with the actual reality, and that we can be absolutely convinced of our perception. I've noticed that those who seem convinced of an objective reality, either a mundane one such as with objectivism, or a fantastic one like with theism, will be dismissive of neuroscience as a source of truth. I think experiments such as the one mentioned at 1:35:38 could help them be unseated from the bedrock of their convictions.
Favourite, is not the right word, but this is one of the most fascinating bits of early atomic research for me, first of all calling a ball of plutonium that you're going to put into a bomb "The Demon Core" is peak dystopian sci fi, secondly experiments into criticality of nuclear cores being done like you were just gonna burn some stripss of magnesium over a bunsen burner in the science lab, no biggie, will never not blow my mind.
"Let me tell you, when yung Rouj had his Senna and Mansell Scalextric, Frank was the goddamn Professor X of F1."
So time may not be an ingredient in a theory of Quantum Gravity or the Theory of Everything? This lady is interesting...
Time feels real to people. But it doesn't even exist, according to quantum physics. “There is no time variable in the fundamental equations that describe the world,” says theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli.
So his book Order of Time is an available as an audio book read by Benedict Cumberbatch. Consider me sold.
As usual it's hard to think about these things without thinking about maths, which pretty much allows for any amount of dimensions above 1 for teh Universe. It's pretty much anywhere between 2 and infinity at this point.
This is very interesting, a look at the differences in our cultures and how they originated, how they cause us to think about the world in very different ways, and how our culture affects our brains -
Really anthropology is the encompassing field here. Science is about understanding the natural world, and humans are very much a part of that world, and thus can be understood by science if only we could process all the variables correctly. I think that understanding humans is arguably the most important area of scientific study right now, given the chaos and general incompetence in the world that is caused by us.
Science isn't all shiny whizzbang lasers and chemicals ya know.