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Magnetoreception is a sense which allows an organism to detect the Earth's magnetic field. Animals with this sense include some arthropods, molluscs, and vertebrates . The sense is mainly used for orientation and navigation, but it may help some animals to form regional maps. Experiments on migratory birds provide evidence that they make use of a cryptochrome protein in the eye, relying on the quantum radical pair mechanism to perceive magnetic fields. This effect is extremely sensitive to weak magnetic fields, and readily disturbed by radio-frequency interference, unlike a conventional iron compass. Birds have iron-containing materials in their upper beaks. There is some evidence that this provides a magnetic sense, mediated by the trigeminal nerve, but the mechanism is unknown.

It's not solvable.

A powerful film (and book) against egalitarianism.

The Wheels Keep on Turning—and the anti-mimetic breaks are breaking.

This is a last call to introduce a "made by an organically-sourced human" label

The tree of life is a fundamental archetype in many of the world's mythological, religious, and philosophical traditions. It is closely related to the concept of the sacred tree. The concept of the tree of life may have originated in Central Asia, and absorbed by other cultures, such as Scandinavian mythology and Altai shamanism.

It's fascinating to see how creative people can get with breached data. Of course there's all the nasty stuff (phishing, identity theft, spam), but there are also some amazingly positive uses for data illegally taken from someone else's system. When I first built Have I Been Pwned (HIBP), my mantra

Instrumentality isn't a permanent event, everyone will "reject" it, but there will be another major problem due to it's occurenceSimply due to the fact that everyone is "maxxed out" on every possible stat due to the nature of the event. This, …

effective accelerationism explained

Many people have a strategy for dealing with online services: don't put anything up that you would be ashamed of if it became public. They don't trust those services to actually keep their information private. I agree, but I don't think they go far enough: I don't trust the future to keep anything private. Sometime around middle school I gave up on privacy. I'd just read a book, I think it was d

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

This is an edited, updated version of an essay I wrote in 2008 when this now popular idea was embryonic and ragged. I recently rewrote it to convey the core ideas, minus out-of-date details. This revisited essay appears in Tim … Continue reading →

“Wat Schopenhauer meant by this?”

My local Montana landfill is full of the remains of short-lived coffee grinders, pens, peelers, laptops. After Christmas, I’ll need to reserve a bigger plot.

WASHINGTON — Today, American Principles Project Foundation (APPF) released a new report, “The Transgender Leviathan,” exploring the origins of the now-powerful movement to normalize transgender ...