Dave Martin | Sports, stupidity & real-time data analysis ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In the intro to the ‘Alien Contact’ event at next month’s World Science Festival in Brisbane it says: Humanity is on the verge of discovering alien life…NASA estimates we’ll find definitive evidence of aliens within 20 to 30 years. Which begs the question: And then what? But really? Are we? Firstly, why do we assume that we are closer than ever, in…
Time is that by virtue of which everything becomes nothingness in our hands and loses all real value. Just because my dog Chunky gets excited when I come home doesn’t mean that he remembers me. Our view of nature is skewed in a way that if it must act in similar ways for us, or else render itself not useful.…
Sidenote: Now this is another potentially flammable issue that contains that pesky thing known as emotion, but I’m going to attempt to address this issue in as dispassionate way as I can, for the purposes of a valid discussion. I’ve been married, and now I’m not. So, where I previously had one wife, I now have exactly 1.0 wives less…
The past is not an indicator of (and definitely doesn’t prove) the future. But maybe the past doesn’t even prove the past. Our perceptions and memories all twist with time, but maybe the past get can totally twisted in ways it’s hard to imagine… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SaLCdhj_5Q
Sidenote: Try to answer this question without mentioning any mathematical temporal intervals to measure duration, like ‘Years/weeks/minutes/seconds etc…’ What is time? (Okay, go…)
We often fear the unknown. In fact, maybe most of our fears are about things that might happen. Or maybe not. So if you’re tossing up a decision between one thing or another, especially when it’s between two things you value, imagine both of them (independently). Picture it in microscopic detail, what do you look like, what do you feel like, where…
Humanity hasn’t faced a serious threat to its existence since the plague ravished Europe, on a smaller scale, hundreds of thousands died of cholera (which still do in underdeveloped countries), the two world wars, or anything like the environmental calamities such as the end of the dinosaurs or the ice age. Until now. It’s possible AI won’t rise up in…
The problem with the things we don’t want to talk about is exactly that: we don’t want to talk about them. But often, and I would argue that always, the things we most consciously avoid talking about are the things we most need to, as they are the most important things. Even in trivial instances, say for example when you…
There’s one thing, just one, that is impossible to ever know about. One thing that no one can ever experience and tell us about, for us to know, for a fact, what it’s like. And yep, that is pretty much my favourite topic to talk about, (just behind this): death. We think death is a terrible event. At least for…
Why are things like seeing panoramic views of cities (say, from the top of skyscrapers or the Eiffel Tower for example) so appealing and so captivating? It’s possible that it’s because we attempt to process in our brains what we, as individuals and as humanity, has achieved, and are capable of achieving. Master feats of engineering that have made us,…