Month: March 2017
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You. Everywhere. [Thinking is about Thinking Everything]
When asked to visualize your childhood home, you can probably picture not only the house you lived in, but also the buildings next door and across the street. MIT neuroscientists have now identified two brain regions that are involved in creating these panoramic memories. These brain regions help us to merge fleeting views of our…
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Computers speaking like humans? Irrelevant.
Google’s DeepMind AI is learning how to talk. And learning how to do it like a person, not a computer. DeepMind has many learning projects going on right now, but the newest one to catch our ears seems to be an increasingly realistic voice and speech pattern system that eliminates more and more of the…
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Observe. Choose. Religion. Science.
We’ve received a birth announcement from 20 million light years away, in the form of our first ever glimpse of what seems to be the birth of a black hole. When massive stars run out of fuel, they die in a huge explosion, shooting out high-speed jets of matter and radiation. What’s left behind collapses…
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The fascism of scientism has a name: Richard Dawkins… “The state needs to ‘protect’ children from religion and their… parents” (!)
In an interview prior to a speech at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, last week, Dawkins told the media that parents have too much influence in their children’s education, especially when it comes to religion. “There is a balancing act and you have to balance the rights of parents and the rights of children, and…
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Non thinking. As complex as thinking?
In 1959, a scientist named Edward Gray showed that the miniscule gaps between neurons where chemical messages are sent, called synapses, come in two main varieties, which researchers later dubbed “excitatory” and “inhibitory.” Inhibitory synapses act as the brakes in the brain, preventing it from becoming overexcited. Researchers thought they were less sophisticated than their…
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