Holiday Message 2018

A typical human lifespan is approximately three billion heartbeats in duration. Lasting that long requires not only intrinsic stability, but an impressive capacity for self-repair. Nevertheless, thing...

27 Jan 20251h 7min

Randomness plays an important role in the evolution of life (as my evil twin will tell you). But random doesn't mean arbitrary. Biological organisms are physical objects, after all, and subject to the...

20 Jan 20251h 30min

Big data is ruling, or at least deeply infiltrating, all of modern existence. Unprecedented capacity for collecting and analyzing large amounts of data have given us a new generation of artificial int...

13 Jan 20251h 9min

A new year, and a new centennial -- 300 (regularly-numbered) episodes of Mindscape! Our tradition is to have a solo episode, and what better topic than the nature of time? Physicists and philosophers ...

6 Jan 20252h 11min

It's the end of the year, and time for our annual holiday break here at Mindscape. But as usual, we wrap up with a Holiday Message. This year, inspired by Joni Mitchell's "Hits" and "Misses" albums, I...

23 Des 20242h 1min

Living organisms seem exquisitely organized and complex, with features clearly adapted to serving certain functions needed to survive and procreate. Natural selection provides a compelling explanation...

16 Des 20241h 13min

The number of neurons in the human brain is comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Unlike the stars, however, in the case of neurons the real action is in how they are directly con...

9 Des 20241h 9min

Welcome to the December 2024 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions asked by Pa...

2 Des 20243h 55min