If it weren’t for the “Men in Black” (M.I.B.), your life might be at constant risk from extraterrestrial activity on earth. The M.I.B. are best known for using “neuralizers” to erase witnesses’ memories of alien sightings. One might therefore wonder whether the M.I.B. considered Dan Simons and Chris Chabris famous gorilla as sufficiently extraterrestrial to neutralize him […]
Human beings communicate in nearly 7,000 different languages. A surprisingly—and perhaps concerningly—large number of those languages is “endangered”, with nearly 500 (or 6%-7%) being listed by UNESCO. Scholars have warned that “World languages are now rapidly being lost”, and like the loss of species diversity, this language extinction has been attributed to economic development—the more successful a […]
My last post dealt with lying—not an unimportant topic given that around 60% of people lie at least once during a 10-minute conversation. It is therefore perhaps concerning that people are by and large quite poor at detecting deception, including law-enforcement personnel such as members of the CIA, the FBI, NSA, and DEA (to name but a few […]
Do you ever lie? Many people would consider this to be a highly confronting question, not only because all of us (sometimes) lie but also because we believe that there is a general moral imperative not to lie. There is actually considerable debate about the moral imperative against lying among philosophers, and it is easy to come up with […]
Strawberries taste great. So does Rogan Josh or falafel, though perhaps not all together at the same time. What does it mean for something to “taste great”? Wikipedia tells us that “Taste is the sensation produced when a substance in the mouth reacts chemically with taste receptor cells located on taste buds.” But is that it? No. […]
You are stranded on a desert island or in the grasslands of a foreign country, without food or water or transportation. Your only friend is a volleyball. Somewhat annoyingly, a prescient memory researcher has pinned a list of words to a tree with instructions for you to rate their relevance to your situation. How relevant is […]
Your spacecraft is spiraling out of control and you will hit Planet Zorg unless you quickly fire up the thermal afterboosters. You fumble for the starter button in the tumbling cockpit…. Which of the two buttons below is more likely to allow you to fire up the boosters on time? Would you be more likely […]
We are social beings. As much as we admire the “rugged individualist”, from the Lone Ranger to Crocodile Dundee, in reality most of us are sensitive to the behavior of others around us. We conform to “social norms” on a myriad of occasions: when queueing for the bus, when participating in recycling because our neighbors do, when we do […]
It was once thought that what we perceive is a straightforward reflection of a stable reality. So, we see a circle to be a certain size because it is a certain size. A quick glance at illusions such as the Ebbinghaus illusion and the Rubik’s cube color illusion clearly show that this is not the case: what we perceive […]
A picture is worth a thousand words—or is it? How does a pulley work? What about a block and tackle? According to Wikipedia, “A pulley is a wheel on an axle that is designed to support movement and change of direction of a cable or belt along its circumference.” When multiple pulleys are combined together “so […]