Category: Dennis Des Chene (aka “Scaliger”)

  • Eric Schwitzgebel recently took up the question of whether an infinitely extended life must be boring. The discussion ended (when I looked at it) with Eric’s fruitfully suggesting that we look at various cognitive architectures and their capacities for boredom over the long run. No doubt there are many kinds of minds. Let’s radically simplify…

  • An article by Alla Katsnelson in Nature (28 April; doi:10.1038/nature.2014.15106; currently free) reports on new results from Jeffrey Mogil, a well-known pain researcher at McGill. Mogil and his team have shown that olfactory exposure to males (humans, rats, cats, dogs, guinea pigs) dampens pain responses in mice. In a paper published in Nature Methods (doi:10.1038/nmeth.2935),…

  • This summer I learned to walk. More precisely, I learned to walk normally. My gait had gotten unsteady, and I was dragging my right foot. Work with an excellent physical therapist helped straighten me out. But balance problems, tremors, and hesitations continued. At the beginning of August I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I want to…