Where is The Mind?: Science gets puzzled and almost admits a non-local mentalscape. This will be the last "home-produced" blog entry for a while [save the short "Everyday Spirituality" which will follow it as a sign-off] . West Virginia beckons tomorrow morning and off I will go to whatever that entails. As I said in one of the commentary responses the other day, I hope that reading two journal runs "cover-to-cover" will bring up a few thoughts worth sharing. This day's entry was inspired by two articles bumped into coincidentally which had scientists puzzling about a holographic universe and a non-local mind. The first of these articles [both from the New Scientist] was "Where in the World is the Mind?" That brings in the second serendipitous article. It reminded me then, also, of a moment when I was able to spend a [too short] time with David Bohm, the famous theoretical physicist. I am happy to be [in body] a holographic projection of force dimensions--not from the "edge" of the universe but its core reality.
Top 3 Reasons to Spice Up Language Learning Evernote, the cross-platform note-taking and archiving service that helps users “remember everything”, is growing and expanding into the educational community. In particular, it has caught the eye of many language learners who, quite simply, want nothing more than to “remember everything” they have learned in and about their foreign languages of study. If you find yourself struggling with the Russian alphabet or German syntax, here are the top 3 reasons to spice up your own language learning odyssey with Evernote. 1. Evernote works by syncing all of your computers and mobile devices through a single account. 2. Long gone are the days when bookmarking was the best way to keep track of your top-100-websites-to-revisit-before-they-get-buried-under-another-100-links. 3. At Voxy, we are currently building an iPhone appthat allows users to learn English in the “privacy of their own phone.” (Visited 1,433 times, 2 visits today)
Exceptional Memory Explained: How Some People Remember What They Had for Lunch 20 Years Ago Researchers from the University of California, Irvine reported in 2006 on a woman named Jill Price who could remember in great detail what she did on a particular day decades earlier. James McGaugh, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker put the woman through a battery of tests and ascertained that she was not using any of the memory tricks that have been known to mnemonists for millennia. Word got out, the media descended and the lab now receives calls every day from people who say they have the same ability as Price. A question that has persisted about this line of research is whether the brains of these people are distinct from the organs of others who can’t remember yesterday’s lunch, let alone trivial events from 20 years back. “There seems to be this extreme organizational capacity, kind of like the tricks that mnemonists use,” says Howard Eichenbaum, a Boston University professor who is editor of the journal Hippocampus. Source: University of California, Irvine
10 Astounding Infographics Comparing Money Matters Around the World 47 Flares Google+ 2 Twitter 31 Facebook 4 Reddit 1 StumbleUpon 1 Pin It Share 0 LinkedIn 8 inShare8 47 Flares × It goes without the saying that comparing wealth and spending in different countries is almost impossible: people work, earn and even spend differently – moreover, their ways of life and views can be too different to compare. However, we still try to compare because people move around the world and they want to know what they can expect in different corners of the globe. Here are the 10 greatest examples of information graphics comparing money, spending and earning around the world: 1. U.S. The most interesting finding of the stats research and the visualization: The U.S. is the clear leader in total annual spending, but ranks 9th in Science performance and 10th in Math. Note: It is unclear what was the measure used to compare the countries in their math and science performance. 2. Most Expensive Cities is the World is an interesting visualization by Home Loan Finder. 3. 4. 5. 6.
The Brain: A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain | Mind & Brain Aiello and Wheeler noted that this dramatic increase in brain size would seem to have required a dramatic increase in metabolism—the same way that adding an air-conditioning system to a house would increase the electricity bill. Yet humans burn the same number of calories, scaled to size, as other primates. Somehow, Aiello and Wheeler argued, our ancestors found a way to balance their energy budget. As they expanded their brains, perhaps they slimmed down other organs. The scientists compared the sizes of organs in humans and other primates. Aiello and Wheeler christened their idea “the expensive tissue hypothesis.” Then William Leonard, a biological anthropologist at Northwestern University, put the expensive tissue hypothesis to a new test. This suggested that the gut-shrinking phenomenon within the primate groups was probably too subtle to explain our increase in brain size completely. Wray and his colleagues compared SLC2A1 in humans and other animals.
Cisco Reminds Us Once Again How Big The Internet Is Getting - Arik Hesseldahl - Enterprise One of the well-worn buzz phrases in tech that re-surfaces from time to time is “The Internet of Things.” When I first encountered it, it was in 2002, and it was used in the title of this story in Forbes about the use of RFID chips by retailers like Wal-Mart to track inventory. Nine years later it draws a big yawn. Now it seems the networking giant Cisco Systems has appropriated it to mean something else entirely, something a lot more meaningful in the larger context of the Internet. Of course, Cisco would like you to associate its brand with these kinds of big thoughts rather than its more workaday corporate troubles. Getting to that utopia will also require completing the transition from IPv4 to IPv6. Anyhow, the fine folks at Cisco have whipped all this big thinking into an easy-to-understand graphic which they’ve kindly shared with me.
Brain Atlas - Introduction The central nervous system (CNS) consists of the brain and the spinal cord, immersed in the cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Weighing about 3 pounds (1.4 kilograms), the brain consists of three main structures: the cerebrum, the cerebellum and the brainstem. Cerebrum - divided into two hemispheres (left and right), each consists of four lobes (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal). The outer layer of the brain is known as the cerebral cortex or the ‘grey matter’. It covers the nuclei deep within the cerebral hemisphere e.g. the basal ganglia; the structure called the thalamus, and the ‘white matter’, which consists mostly of myelinated axons. – closely packed neuron cell bodies form the grey matter of the brain. Cerebellum – responsible for psychomotor function, the cerebellum co-ordinates sensory input from the inner ear and the muscles to provide accurate control of position and movement. Basal Ganglia Thalamus and Hypothalamus Ventricles Limbic System Reticular Activating System Neurons Glia
Cool Infographics - Blog