Changizi News

Cognitive scientist and author Mark Changizi’s recent writings, arrayed for easy access here.

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Why even Data from Star Trek would have fuzzy language.

A word is vague if it has borderline cases. Yul Brynner (the lead in “The King and I”) is definitely bald, I am (at the time of this writing) definitely not, and there are many people who seem to be neither. These people are in the “borderline region” of ‘bald’, and this phenomenon is central to vagueness. [...]

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Why Do We Cry? Eight Half-Baked Ideas

Crying is a waste of perfectly good water. So why we do it? I have no idea, so I would like to hear your ideas. To get the ball rolling, here are eight hypotheses, each surely inadequate and probably false. (1) Purple Haze: When the tears “well up” under the skin, even before overflowing, the [...]

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Where Are the Pain Engineers?

As seen in classified ads… Have a talent and enjoyment for inflicting prescribed doses of pain? Your dream job awaits. (Biology undergraduate required.) Contact: 555-8428 ~~~~~ You are not supposed to be reading this. You’re an ape who never evolved to read, but you can do so because writing culturally evolved to be shaped just [...]

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Twitter to Shorten Tweet Length to 20 Characters

Already well-known for its short character length limits, in a press conference scheduled for later today, Twitter will announce that it will severely shorten its allowable “tweets”. “I’m frankly amazed at all the crap people fit into their tweets,” said Twitters’ founder Jack Dorsey by phone with me yesterday. “By shortening tweets to 20 characters, [...]

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