mssv

  • Dentist

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    Went to the dentist today. As I mulled over the psychological impact of hearing the whirr of a drill on patients (perhaps if you used a silent drill people wouldn’t make the association between pain and the drill?) the dentist took a couple of x-rays of my teeth. I hadn’t been to the dentist for…

  • Discourse markers

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    I exhausted my link-finding ability today after constructing a post to Metafilter about discourse markers such as ‘you know’ and ‘I mean’. Read and enjoy.

  • Wired

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    The June issue of Wired Magazine is now online – ever since their new editor came in, Wired stopped their practice of putting issues on the web a month late. This was probably a good idea – the magazine is so cheap in America ($10 for a year’s subscription) that you might as well subscribe,…

  • Saddam writing

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    An amusing article at Reason on Saddam’s career as the best-selling novelist in Iraqi history (even before his book was released, would you believe it).

  • Spooks

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    The BBC has started up a new AI-like game! Quite a surprise, I’ll have to admit. It’s called ‘Spooks’ and you can find the entry page here. Positive points: It’s done by the BBC, who have a good track record of Internet stuff. They openly acknowledge a debt to Microsoft’s AI game. It’s tied to…

  • SBC

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    I got an email today from my psychology supervisor, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen (the autistics guy) who said that unfortunately he wouldn’t be able to give us an extra supervision for the exams since he’s flying out to Kosovo to help with their new child psychiatry service. I think that is impossibly neat.

  • GM babies

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    To Enhance or Not To Enhance – I’m not sure why this guy talks about artificial chromosomes, I can think of several major reasons why this would is far from the best way of genetically altering embryos. Modification of the existing embryonic DNA would work better and in a more predictable manner.

  • 24 (part 2)

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    The usual assortment of rogues turned up to today’s episode of 24 and firmly established their territorial right to the TV. “24?” asked two guys walking in, hopefully. “Yup,” we replied. They looked downcast, and said, “Not To Die For?” We responded in the negative. “It’s a good movie, but not today,” shaking our heads…

  • Haiku 2

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    The folks at New Mars won second place in the Kuro5hin haiku contest for the princely sum of $24! See the reaction at the New Mars forums.

  • Garden path

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    2 comments on Garden path

    There’s an interesting phenomenon in language comprehension called the ‘garden path effect’. Proposed by Frazier and Fodor (1979), it basically meant that when you are reading or hearing a sentence, you split it up into chunks (you parse it), and due to something called ‘late closure’ you keep on adding as many words as possible…