I liked the movie, but this blog post is about my pet theory of sleep from an information-theoretic standpoint.

During wakefulness, the brain keeps receiving input from all its senses. It is busy recognizing the input and responding to it. Presumably, this input (and the results of the brain's early processing of it to generate a response) get stored in a memory dedicated to sense data.

We live in a harsh economic world. Almost half the world lives in poverty http://www.globalissues.org/article/26/poverty-facts-and-stats.

It is a well-studied phenomenon that poor communities are more prone to adopting religions https://www.google.ca/search?q=poverty+and+religion+correlation. Why?

or, Gamifying the software project.

The software project is a game. The team objective is to score the highest points for the project, where points are gained by accomplishing tasks within due parameters and lost otherwise.

Some elements of the game are:

• Specifications
• Milestones
• Bugs
• Deliverables: use cases, designs, wireframes, graphic assets, running code, bugs, text copy, translations, documentation, test plans, etc.

To me, we are severely under-utilizing our mind/brain/body apparatus.

The honing pigeon possesses the ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field, and to orient itself accordingly. It's called Magnetoception. It may exist in humans too!

...

• Are you steroids? I never had so many tickets...... :)

• Yes, I am steroids :-)

• Hahaha you know what I meant. this f****ing chileans ESL.....

Kids are getting taller.

This seemingly trivial observation carries with it deep implications as to the future of humankind, in the biological sense.

The human body is growing in height. Maybe also in width and volume? What about the brain and other organs?

facebook spelled the death of the social blogs. which is a shame, because expressivity in facebook is limited to plain text, user linking, multimedia and a narrow set of primitive actions. whereas on blogs, it was their virtually unlimited flexibility and variation that ultimately resulted in a disconnected chaos that led to low social engagement at the pan-blog level. facebook lowered the bar to self-publishing, "dumbed it down" to great popular success, sacrificing the full blog expressivity to achieve that goal.

consider unicellular organisms. over the course of evolution, these organisms evolved a differentiated set of skills. to better survive, each strand of organism would "team up" with a different, complementary strand where, together, they would stand a better chance for survival.

these organisms fused together, giving up their individuality to become a super-organism. of these unions and their progenies, some strands survived and some perished. again, these superorganisms fused into yet-higher organisms, and so on.

Problem-solving itself can be modeled. Let's start with a real-life example: Washing dishes using a dishwasher.

One must place the dirty dishes inside the dishwasher, load up the detergents, choose a washing program, and activate the dishwasher.

Dishes must be rinsed manually before being placed in the dishwasher, to ensure maximum cleanliness. Rinsing is a distinct activity, that does not involve the dishwasher in its performance. Rinsing involves one or more sinks, a garbage collector, sponge(s), detergent(s), possibly other types of scrubs. The main resource used is hot water.