It’s a pretty funny cosmic joke that when the brain nears death it often feels like there is more than the dying brain.

Stigmata in the palms are one of those things where the idea has overtaken the reality (nails were inserted through the wrists for crucifixion).

A nice "hack" to intelligent thinking: assume everyone is both "right" & "wrong" in some way, even those you vehemently disagree with. Your own working out of where these align gives you a way in for communicating and leading.

Pretty cool that a simple extension of "nearly human intelligence" LLM thinking models is to run several versions of the thinking in parallel and then integrate it all into one response. That is something humans can't do. (Most humans struggle with two contradictory ideas.).

Our Gods need to be “minimally counterintuitive” - defy the laws of physics but in a very human-oriented causal manner. They rarely defy the laws of physics in ways that our minds cannot comprehend. But incomprehensible violations are overwhelmingly more likely.

Apparently Christianity decided on the date of conception (the spring equinox) before the date for Christmas. It just so happens the latter also coincides with existing winter solstice and Saturnalia festivals.

Late capitalism classic.

Good Thoughts, Bad Thoughts [Also a rough translation of 3000 year old Zoroastrianism morality and belief.].

Atheists often decry the simplicity of the core beliefs of religion; but dig into any sect and there is often huge complexity of belief. Rather it seems that certain religious beliefs are often simple in the canon because these are what sticks over repetitions lasting millennia.

Exile to Babylon is often seen as a disaster in Judaism but without it you wouldn’t have had the contact and blending of elements of Zoroastrianism, and Christianity maybe wouldn’t have a heaven & hell, & Islam wouldn’t have Wudu & Salah (amongst lots more).

The roots of the word “anger” indicate narrowness, constriction, or tightness (old Indu-European = tie together > German/Norse). They actually convey a bit better the psychological and physiological reality of anger. (The Norse is also tinged with grief and sorrow.).

Are we angrier as a species?. Have we allowed anger to take us over?. But “anger” use dips in the period of “World War” hatred. Maybe that was beyond anger.

The longer I live and work in technology, and read and listen, the more I’m pretty sure that 95% of human beings have no understanding of probability (or any large-scale statistical pattern). Eg. two seemingly contradictory facts can be “true”, but one can be much more likely.

The shaman with a thousand faces [Love these podcasts that look at proto-religion, anthropology, & physiology/psychology - looking at the building blocks of shamanism here: eg. large populations, low-cost interventions, agency, altered sensory states. ].

Lucy Bronze: Lioness defender played entire Euro 2025 tournament with fractured tibia - BBC Sport [Now this is extreme hardcore.].

One of my perennial bug-bears is that humans are so often blind to the effort that is required to keep things running smoothly (see households, companies, software) - they only see when things go wrong and complain, not everything that is going right that would go wrong.

RIP Ozzy - that’s the way to go out - 🫡.

Racism based on skin colour is so stupid because it’s “white” humans who are the aberration - we only evolved alleles for better vitamin-D synthesis via reduced melanin 20k years ago in Turkey & we had agriculture before “white” Northern Europeans; Cheddar man was dark skinned.

It’s not as well known in public that artists and musicians are as overweighted in ASD groups as mathematicians and engineers. Two expressions of a similar neural variation?

A good argument against God is that our morality is so imperfect and human-shaped. Surely a morality provided from the heavens would be perfect as a reflection of the divine?.