Category: Kent Crispin

Originally shared by Kevin Rutkowski

On a recent episode of NPR’s Unknown Brain, philosopher David Chalmers asks why humans have a sense of self, a constantly running movie full of sensation and internal chatter. He offers two ideas about the nature of consciousness.

Chalmers goes on to say that, “Physics studies all this stuff from the outside – their interactions with each other, their relations to each other. But they’ve got to have an intrinsic nature. It’s got to be something, and physics doesn’t tell us about that.”

Do you agree with Chalmers, that physics is not part of our intrinsic nature or could contribute to solving the mystery of consciousness?

Originally shared by Shah Khalid (Eusufzai)

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/870835/HTML-Canvas-Create-a-Nice-Animation

Love the tiny galaxies in the distance… 🙂

Originally shared by Astronomy Picture of the Day (APoD)

Palomar 12

Image Credit: European Space Agency, ESA/Hubble, NASA

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap150219.html

Palomar 12 was not born here. The stars of the globular cluster, first identified in the Palomar Sky Survey, are younger than those in other globular star clusters that roam the halo of our Milky Way Galaxy. Palomar 12’s position in our galaxy and measured motion suggest its home was once the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, a small satellite of the Milky Way. Disrupted by gravitational tides during close encounters the satellite galaxy has lost its stars to the larger Milky Way. Now part of the Milky Way’s halo, the tidal capture of Palomar 12 likely took place some 1.7 billion years ago. Seen behind spiky foreground stars in the sharp Hubble image, Palomar 12 spans nearly 60 light-years. It lies about 60,000 light-years away, toward the constellation Capricornus.

Backyard sunset, looking toward the San Mateo Bridge

Originally shared by David L.

California coast: 2

Bixby bridge on Highway 1.

Originally shared by Lê Nguyên Hoang

In 2013, three dozens of today’s brightest minds have just laid out new foundation of mathematics after a year of collective effort. This new paradigm better fits both informal and computationally-checkable mathematics. There is little doubt that it will fundamentally change our perspective on rigorous knowledge, and it could be that, in a few decades, the book they published turns out to be the bedrock of all mathematics, and, by extension, all human knowledge! Have a primer of this upcoming revolution, with this article on type theory, the theory that the book builds upon!

A cat named Nini

Another backyard bird