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News Briefs 04-08-2015

I welcome you to today’s news briefs with open arms

Quote of the Day:

Science is but an image of the truth.

Francis Bacon

Editor
  1. Hitchhiking Robot
    Humans are not terrible. Philadelphia is terrible and anyone in New Jersey could have told them that. You stay out of Philly if you want to live!

  2. Berenstein Bears/The Mandela Effect
    There are people who remember when Anne Rice’s famous novel was spelled Interview With A Vampire as well. I’m not one of them although I have experienced people dying twice. Not Mandela though.

    1. Bears go in the Woods
      What dafuq?
      I read the article twice and still don’t get it. I think I still have some of those books in my garage, may have to dig them out.

      Read my comment below after emlong, my tablet crashed and this got cut off 😛

    1. It was always Berenstein as I
      It was always Berenstein as I remember or rather “sound out.” Lord knows I read that book a lot to my kids. The perceptual mistake is perhaps an example of how the brain lapses when fatigued by repetitious reading of material that is mind crushingly boring after awhile. The cover of the book where the name is featured was a cover I learned to dread and gave it hardly a glance whenever I had to pick the book up for the umpteenth time to read once again. How many parents out there have found themselves “waking up” in the middle of reading a childrens’ book to find that they have been correctly reciting the book with no memory whatsoever of how they got to where they are in the story?
      Berenstein is the much more expected spelling – it is the most often encountered tail end of Jewish proper names. “Stain” just doesn’t compute, and creates a jot of cognitive dissonance – ending a name in “stain” just doesn’t sound nice, so the brain fills in that blank incorrectly,

      1. Here’s a theory
        My mom used to pronounce it as “bern-steen”. I was too young to really read at the time so I didn’t pay attention to spellings and words as much. I honestly hated reading. My mom also grew up in the time of WWII and her father, my grandfather, served in the war against the Nazis, so there was a lot of German words flying around the house when she was young. Is it possible then that every parent who grew up during WWII and was reading to their own children this book in 1992 was just pronouncing it as Stein rather than Stain because that’s what they were used to reading/hearing/saying from ingrained German names in their mind? The brain subconsciously corrects a word that is misspelled as you read it in a periodical or book. As someone who designs a magazine, I can’t bring myself to read any of the articles during the process because I tend to miss spelling errors. Thank goodness we have three editors! You mind wants to pronounce it as Stein because that is a very common name. You could easily prove this theory. Read this: Einstain. I bet your brain said Einstein first didn’t it?

  3. Backwards time travel
    The article mentions the “grandfather paradox”. A variant of this is the “not invented here” paradox. Suppose someone develops a time machine and goes back to before Edison and introduces the invention of the electric light – the whole thing including use of a carbon filament, etc.

    Or the time machine could be used to send the works of Shakespeare to England before the playwright’s birth.

    Therefore in our world this invention or dramatic literary work (creative products of mind) would exist with no creator – they would be “brute facts” with by principle absolutely no cause or explanation.

    Surely if some idea violates basic logic it must be physically impossible. Backwards time travel should be considered theoretically impossible, contrary to the claim of the article. This should for certain relegate the article to the bin for useless sci-fantasy speculation.

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