Marlow’s Listener

Magnitude 8.8 – OFFSHORE MAULE, CHILE

Monstrous big, but 50 years ago, a 9.5 in the same region.

if someone failed to get the joke, the rostral cingulate zone of the brain became more active

And did you hear the one about the amygdala and the hippocampus?

Here, unlike when I am in England–and escaped from what Robert Louis Stevenson called ‘the Bastille of civilisation’–I find it no hardship to rise with the sun and pick my way through the boobyalla for a barefoot tramp on the sand.

when we find an unexpected result repeatedly, our confidence that it is signal and not noise is vastly higher

In the late sixties the Canadian psychologist Laurence J. Peter advanced an apparently paradoxical principle, named since then after him, which can be summarized as follows: ‘Every new member in a hierarchical organization climbs the hierarchy until he/she reaches his/her level of maximum incompetence’. Despite its apparent unreasonableness, such a principle would realistically act in [...]

Explosions are basically a waste of energy in space.

More recently, he has been proselytizing among paleontologists, urging them to hunt for fossilized dinosaur vomit.

The theory is undeniably crazy — but not crackpot, which is a distinction worth drawing.