Vampire Bats Vampire bats have a highly regulated collection of social instincts. One of them is the capability of doing each other favors, and remembering who has done favors for whom. They’ll go hunting, some will come back with blood, some won’t. The ones that don’t get any blood will borrow from […]
Donut Gun Hypnosis Pattern
College Job When I was in college I got this cool job at a donut shop. I’d never really thought about donuts before them, from an engineering standpoint. I worked late afternoons, early evenings, when you got to make all the donuts. You took processed flour, sugar and some coloring, mixed it […]
The Once And Future Hallucination
The Demon There was this philosopher guy a couple hundred years ago named Descartes. He came up with a problem that was unsolvable then, and unsolvable now. The problem was how do we know whether what is happening all around us is real, or just a hallucination? His idea was that our […]
The Benefits Of Female Hypergamy
Getting A Bad Rap A lot of people, mostly men, have been talking about something called hypergamy lately. It’s a relatively modern term and generally refers to how women will rather have a more wealthy and powerful mate, all else equal. It’s often pointed out that a woman will always date up, […]
Social Proof Hallucination
End Of Stone Age The stone age ended when ancient humans figured out how to smelt ore, get the metal out and make tools and weapons. They’ve found very intricately decorated bowls in some of the oldest mines. They suspect it’s the humans giving gifts to the gods of the Earth in exchange […]
Evolution Of Indestructible Roaches
Hand Cleanser If you use alcohol based hand cleansers, it’s possible you are purposely altering the natural evolution of potentially dangerous microbes. It works like this. When you put the hand sanitizer on, it kills almost all of the germs. 99.9%. Which ones doesn’t it kill? It kills all but the very strongest. […]
Sex Beliefs and Social Status
Young Anthropologist There was this young female anthropologist during Victorian England that went on an expedition by herself to some island in the South Seas to study the people that lived in the South Seas. The people that lived in the South Seas had dealt with British people before and they could sort of […]
Open Manhole Cover
Tricky Applicant There is this guy a few years ago who wanted to get a job at a very sought after tech company, one of the big tech companies. But he didn’t want to go through the same motions that everyone else did because he would be put in the same pool of applicants as […]
Unlocking Hidden Energy
Troy A Myth? For the longest time historians believe it that the Trojan war story in the city of Troy was completely a myth. Nobody really believed that the ancient city of Troy was a real place until very recently when they started to find some archaeological evidence that Troy was indeed an actual city. […]
Interdependent Co-Evolved Instincts
Cute Babies I read a recent article in a science magazine that suggested that the instinct to pick up and protect a cute baby is an evolutionarily beneficial instinct. If you can imagine two different tribes of people, one tribe that had the protect the cute baby instinct and another try that had the […]
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