Self-incapacitation

A 'bad philosophy' can be more incapacitating than an actual handicap.

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The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis and the 'Wet Look'

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An Aquatic Ape I think the strongest 'circumstantial evidence' supporting a partial form of the (controversial)  aquatic ape hypothesis * is something I don't think I've seen mentioned before: The simple fact that we find  wet Homo sapiens sexually attractive. If you think about it, doesn't it seem a bit arbitrary? E.g. would gorillas find other wet gorillas sexy, or would rats find other wet rats sexy? How universal is this? If we consider the concept of sexual choice ** in evolution, then if our ancestors were once partially evolving "in that direction", then we might expect that they may have felt  a mate choice preference  for the entailed characteristics of a hypothetical "aquatic ape" (such as the 'wet look', as well as finding smooth, hairless skin comparatively more attractive, as we do). To consider this argument, look at a picture like the one above (or  this ,  this ,  this ,  this , or  this ) ... then (for...
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Stopping Aging

Some thoughts on aging. Aging seems to me 'unnecessary'. Imagine all the benefits if we could cure aging, and have lifespans of over 1000 years. If we had 1000-year+ lifespans, journeys to other stars that may take e.g. 'hundreds' of years would suddenly seem reachable 'within a human lifespan'. I see curing aging as ultimately "just" a (big, complex) technological problem to solve. A big complex puzzle with lots of pieces, but a solvable puzzle. A very big, complex and difficult problem to solve (to be sure) - but I feel it must be solvable. Our bodies are ultimately just machines. Really complex machines. And solvable possibly potentially within most of our lifespans, if we try. Attitudes like "Oh, we are just meant to age" seem like confounders to progress toward solving these problems - we could solve it faster if more people dedicated attention to it instead of simply assuming it's unsolvable, or adopting irrational quasi-religious v...
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Hubble Ultra-Deep Field Image

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I think the Hubble UDF/XDF is probably  one of the most interesting images  in astronomy ... in short, every one of those dots/blobs is an entire galaxy , each with (on average) in the order of hundreds of millions of stars ... and the staggering part is that this image shows only an extremely tiny portion of our sky (much smaller than the visual area the Moon occupies). The implication is that the number of galaxies in our 'observable' sliver of the universe alone is probably in the hundreds of billions. So a crude low-ball estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe would probably then be ~15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or take (and based on observations of our own galaxy so far from the Kepler observatory, if our galaxy is representative, it's probable that a large percentage of these stars have planets, though that is 'scientifically speculative'). So when you look at the night sky, consider that in each roughly Moon-sized a...
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