Fifty years of the brain’s sense of space.
H wie Habermas. Special edition of the Zeitschrift für Ideengeschichte.
The Webb Space Telescope will rewrite cosmic history. If it works.
An interview with Jean-Luc Nancy.
Der ganze Text der Büchnerpreisrede von Clemens J. Setz.
Dossieronline.at Vol. 5 is entirely dedicated to Clemens J. Setz.
A new model of learning centers on bursts of neural activity that act as teaching signals — approximating backpropagation, the algorithm behind learning in AI.
Brain neural patterns and the memory function of sleep.
Sleep is not just for the brain.
How ‘sleep misperception’ fools people into thinking they don’t sleep. Research on slumbering volunteers reveals the surprising stage when we feel most deeply asleep.
Revolving around Lou Reed and John Cale, Todd Haynes’s documentary on the avant-garde rock band is itself an art project in the spirit of Andy Warhol’s Factory.
David Wallace-Wells on the hidden health toll of polluted air.
Hyun Song Shin on blockchain technology and decentralised finance. More here and here.
Kwame Anthony Appiah reviews The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow. Must we find our future in the past?
People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own. “Using Google to answer general knowledge questions artificially inflates peoples’ confidence in their own ability to remember and process information and leads to erroneously optimistic predictions regarding how much they will know without the internet.”
The thought gap after conversation: Underestimating the frequency of others’ thoughts about us. “After conversations, people continue to think about their conversation partners. They remember their stories, revisit their advice, and replay their criticisms. But do people realize that their conversation partners are doing the same?”
Telling time in Tokugawa Japan. “In 17th-century Japan, (..) people divided their day into 12 unequal hours, following an ancient Chinese system introduced in Japan in the 7th century. Daylight and darkness were each split into six equal parts, no matter what the season. The daylight hours grew longer in the summer and shorter in the winter, with the reverse occurring for the nighttime hours.”
Most illustrations of butterflies are wrong. “Butterflies that are alive and going about their business of flying and nectaring do not typically hold their forewings too far forward of their head. In life, the way a butterfly holds its wings is variable, but it is uncommon for most species that I’ve encountered to hold their forewings in the manner of pinned specimen.”