No, this is not a Dr. Who fanfiction, but I couldn’t resist the allure of what I like to think passes for a clever title for a post about a new change to international standard timekeeping. That’s right: instead of worrying about minor controversies over things like religion, politics, or the Great Pumpkin, what should really be getting your blood pressure up is the CGPM’s vote to abolish the leap second.
Artificial Miracles
What really is the difference between something that is natural and something that is artificial?
Autocomplete Your Story
Now, tools that leverage artificial intelligence can predict entire paragraphs of writing, rewrite your paper for you, and may one day do the first draft, too.
Energy Storage
If I wanted to make this post extremely short, I could probably leave it at this: we humans are absolutely terrible at energy storage.
On the Origin of Triton and Pluto
The paper proposed a radically new hypothesis for the origin story of Pluto and Triton, and in the process laid the groundwork for a whole new understanding of the structure and formation of the entire solar system.
A Constant State of Anxiety?
The human mind is an astonishingly, perhaps incomprehensibly complicated entity, and there is absolutely a capacity for it to malfunction; however, the only tool we have to diagnose it is...the human mind, which is as fallible as it is amazing.
Failing Writing Aliens
I wanted to dedicate a post to a specific aspect of writing science fiction: writing aliens. Or, as the title more accurately asserts, failing to write aliens.
Revising Memories
His specific claim, “this finding led to the idea that ACSS2 could be involved in unwanted memory formation,” was what set off my internal alarm bells.
Effect and Cause
A recent Writing Excuses episode to which I listened discussed the ideas of disordered storytelling, and means of writing stories that are intended to be read in an order other than from the first page to the last page. Unfortunately, it didn't really dig into the topic the way I hoped it would engage with it.
Causing Correlation
I promised you a post on causation and correlation way back when we reviewed The Art of Thinking Clearly, and as you longtime readers know, I usually eventually get around to keeping those kinds of promises.
IGC Publishing 