title, what title?

... bullshit. And Susan Miller is a charlatan. Meet Susan Miller. According to the one of the most serious Turkish news portal -arguably-, she's a world famous astrologist. She visited Turkey, and made the prophecy that something incredible was to happen on 21. December 2010. Considering the rate with which big news stories are fabricated/happen in Turkey, a more interesting prophecy would have been that there would be nothing serious on that day. But lets leave this aside. This vague prophecy, that something big will happen in Turkey on 21. December made the mainstream news. Result? I guess you knew, just as I did, what the result would be on the day she made the prophecy. I still didn't want this to go unnoticed. Links to this post: http://www.ntvmsnbc.com/id/25159026/

I've been reading about evolutionary psychology lately. The premise of evolutionary psychology, which goes hand-in-hand with the current advances in neuro-biology, is that our brain is composed of cognitive organs which evolved just like other parts of our body, and therefore human behaviors can be explained from an evolutionary perspective. One of the biases we inherited from our caveman ancestors is the tendency to associate "bad" things in the "society" we live with an external agent. We always look for a villain outside. Another shortcoming of our brains is that we don't come in terms with mathematical phenomena that do not occur in our everyday lives. Everyone knows the story of the king who was fooled by his clever servant who wanted two times the grain of gold on each tile of a chess board. That is because we never come across exponential grow in our lives, and hence did not evolve a sub-organ for it. As a matter of fact there are some tribes who don...

One of the most striking passages I read in Hagakure , the Samurai's guide, was the following: "In the words of the ancients, one should take his decisions in the matter of seven breaths." It suited my way of thinking back then, when I read the book. The western tradition has a profound belief that the more you think, the more sound your decisions will be. Though I believe in the power of deep thinking when it comes to creating something, or coming up with new ideas, this does not mean the same applies to taking decision based on existing facts. Now the scientists in Norway, Holland, USA and Germany have made a very interesting discovery, which somehow verifies this Japanese wisdom. By scanning the decision making parts of the brain using a functional MRI, they have shown that the decision making parts of the brain are activated 10 seconds before the decisions are taken at the "conscious" level. In other words, we became aware of the decisions we take at the cel...