The autumn is almost perfect here in Budapest and so it is easy for me to forget the few pleasures of the cold, gray and rainy Estonian autumn. But this article definitely captures one of them. Exploring known and unknown forests, hunting for mushroom to later cook them or preserve them — that is a damn…
Although the idea that psychopathy is a black and white kind of a mental disorder will probably not go away anywhere, there has been quite a bit of chatter on the Internet recently about a different kind of a perspective on this topic. About the fact that it is not a condition, but a spectrum,…
A while ago I finished a late night project that had been ongoing for about half a year – reading all the 15 books in Isaac Asimov’s so-called Foundation Universe. This includes his collections of robot short stories, the four robot novels, the three empire novels and the seven foundation novels. All the 15 books…
How is it possible to have any kind of trust in day-to-day politics or politicians when it seems that lying or what perhaps should more precisely be called bullshitting has become (or always has been?) endemic to the game? A competition for the chief editor for the only decent cultural newspaper in Estonia failed, then suddenly…
One thing that all animals do is sleep, yet there is still no clear idea of why we do it and why it is so necessary. Many of the possible explanations that I have heard before have had something to do with memory formation or something similar to that. Thus, it was quite interesting to…
The scope of scientific inquiry sometimes leaves you amazed. We can study the origins of the universe, what makes matter and energy, how our brains function to give rise to our consciousness… and how mammals pee. And this is quite distant from how far you can go. The top of the WTF list for me…
What appeals to me about science fiction are the worlds and societies that authors can imagine; the kinds of future they are able to conjure for humanity; the issues and problems these new and strange times and worlds can give rise to. Themes that are bigger than specific characters and their stories and relationships. And…
It seems that there is a gene for almost everything, so it is not surprising that further evidence for a relationship between genes and how people emotionally relate to each other has been found as reported in this article. I guess the most interesting thing about all of this is that in some years time…
An article in the Guardian gives us a glimpse of where we might be going, after having realized that the ‘chemical imbalance’ metaphor for treating psychological problems was full of crap and that many psychoactive drugs work not much better than placebos. Intervening directly in the brain certainly sounds more ‘promising’ than flooding it with chemicals for which we…
Ever since a friend of mine encouraged me to read a few excellent books on genes and evolution during high school, I have found this topic rather fascinating and have kept half an eye open for what some of the broad currents in that domain are. And so I came across this article, that introduces…