Live forever or die trying
Psychologists at Radboud University in The Netherlands carried out the study after one of them was so struck on impressing an attractive woman he had never met before, that he could not remember his address when she asked him where he lived.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
The key area of the brain is a knot of nerve cells known as the right temporo-parietal junction (RTPJ).
The researchers subjected 20 volunteers to a number of tests designed to assess their notions of right and wrong.
In one scenario participants were asked how acceptable it was for a man to let his girlfriend walk across a bridge he knew to be unsafe.
After receiving a 500 millisecond magnetic pulse to the scalp, the volunteers delivered verdicts based on outcome rather than moral principle.
If the girlfriend made it across the bridge safely, her boyfriend was not seen as having done anything wrong.
In effect, they were unable to make moral judgments that require an understanding of other people’s intentions.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Posted via email from crasch’s posterous
“How far has brain preservation technology progressed in the intervening decades?” and “Exactly what level of brain preservation is necessary to have a reasonable chance of restoring a person?”
A Brain Preservation Technology Prize has the unique ability to get the scientific community to start asking these questions. It can accomplish this purely by putting forward a clear set of milestones for a preservation technique to achieve. Brain preservation is simply the only possible alternative to death on the near-term (<20 years) horizon, but today there is almost no serious research being performed on the topic. We simply must reinvigorate scientific debate on this important subject. A well publicized and adequately funded prize will do just that.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Via Corlis Baranyk.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Posted via email from crasch’s posterous
But in many ways Congress is nothing like a prostitute. A prostitute only wants cash that customers actually have, and usually tells them the real price of the services being purchased. A prostitute doesn’t impose hidden fees through inflation (we don’t generally give prostitutes the power to print money, but somehow we let Congress approve stimulus packages and spend money that doesn’t exist). A prostitute doesn’t increase the national debt (in fact, it is government, by keeping prostitution illegal, that increases the deficit in yet another way, by making income from prostitution outside of the system and not taxable).
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous
Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the “right” to education, the “right” to health care, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.
There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.
Posted via web from crasch’s posterous