drmstream[writing]

via mjperry.blogspot.com More peo­ple, liv­ing longer, con­sum­ing more resources, increas­ing com­pe­ti­tion, dri­ves inno­va­tion. I look back over my life­time and believe that the sin­gle biggest force of change has been the growth of the U.S. pop­u­la­tion from 150 mil­lion to 300 mil­lion and the global pop­u­la­tion from about 3 bil­lion to 7 bil­lion. One major […]

Seed Mag­a­zine has a post elab­o­rat­ing on the phe­nom­e­non of the uncanny val­ley, and con­nect­ing the writ­ing of Freud and the gen­e­sis of the con­cept of the uncanny val­ley from Masahiro Mori with the recent work from Asif Ghaz­an­far. The hypoth­e­siz­ing about the uncanny value has focused on the premise of human­ness, the essence of […]

“At the moment when human beings cut them­selves off from the con­scious­ness of them­selves as nature, all pur­poses for which they keep them­selves alive — social progress, the height­en­ing of mate­r­ial and intel­lec­tual forces, indeed con­scious­ness itself — becomes void, and the enthrone­ment of the means as an end, which in late cap­i­tal­ism is taking […]

I have looked in a mir­ror and won­dered who that is. I’ve caught a glimpse of a man­nequin as I’ve turned a cor­ner on a dark, wet night and felt uneasy. This is the val­ley effect. The object looks too real but is too flawed. It is encroach­ing on the space of human­ness. The discomfort […]

via psychologytoday.com Here’s a strik­ing graphic for those of us who are rais­ing chil­dren, or who won­der what made us do the things we did when we were 18. The five brain scans show how the brain matures from the ages of 5 to 20. Those parts of the brain that con­trol impulse and help to […]

Two recent arti­facts tickle the imag­i­na­tion and, per­haps, raise some fig­ment of our core essence. They date to 35,000 years ago. The first is a fig­urine from the Hohle Fels Cave in south­west Ger­many. The sec­ond are musi­cal instru­ments from the same site. I report the dis­cov­ery of a female mammoth-ivory fig­urine in the basal Auri­gna­cian deposit […]