Backpacking Trip I was backpacking with friend once and I had a particularly frightening experience. We’d been planning this trip, a five day loop in the sierras, for a few months. Part of it involved taking a shortcut that was suggested in the guide. Shortcuts Never Work Out https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Nov30Loop.mp4 We got halfway […]
Galileo’s Timepiece
Drugs and Brains For every drug you can take, that can give you an interesting mental experience, you have to have a corresponding receptor in your brain. Drugs, whether they be naturally occurring in nature, or highly synthesized and concentrated in a lab, can only work if they match with a pre-existing receptor site […]
Treasure Hunting Symmetry
Emmy Noether There was a German mathematician, Emmy Noether, who came up with a beautiful idea linking symmetry and conservation laws. She said that wherever you find any kind of symmetry, you’ll find a corresponding conservation law. And whenever you have a conservation laws, there will be an equivalent symmetry somewhere. Invisible […]
Self Sabotaging Magic
Circus Theory In the circus, they have trapeze artists whose job it is to flip around up in the air, so people can watch this and be entertained. But to maximize the enjoyment of these tricks, they must provide a safety net for the trapeze artists. Without a safety net, the trapeze artists […]
Colonization Plans
What You See Isn’t Real There are a lot of cool optical illusions floating around. They are, of course, built by understanding the inefficiency of our visual perception. Most of what we see is an approximation, and by purposely creating false approximations, we will see things that aren’t really there. The field […]
Self Replicating Cults
Secret Psychology There is this psychologist who has been studying cults for a long time. His angle is to compare their origin stories and their underlying mythological identity structure. For example, Heaven’s Gate had the idea that dying meant going to a higher plane, and that involved aliens. Famous Cultists https://loopvids.s3.amazonaws.com/Nov22Loop.mp4 Jim […]
Demon Planet
Exorcism Increase There have been a lot of stories in various news media about the increasing number of exorcisms. Some say this is correlated to the slowly collapsing global economy. Some say this is correlated to the rise of civil unrest in many parts of the world. One theory says this is […]
Oscillating Desires
Finally Broke Up I have a friend who just broke up with her boyfriend. She’d been wanting to break up with him for a long time, and was always asking my advice, and she finally did it. Now she’s having regrets, and she wanted me to hypnotize her to help forget the things […]
Hypothetical Love Insanity
Professor Love There was this PhD student a few decades ago who had some very controversial ideas about love. His theory was that all love was based on self-hypnosis, and he wanted to prove this for his doctoral thesis. He chose ten women at random, on his campus, and didn’t even tell them […]
Weaponized Love Spells
Sucker Every Minute PT Barnum famously said there is a sucker born every minute. But the corollary to that idea is that we are suckers because we are willing to believe things that are too good to be true. And when it comes to modern snake oil scams that we keep falling for […]
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