The Awesome Science of Chinonomics

The human brain is a marvelous adaptation. More than that. It's our super weapon. If we measured its capacity in bytes, it would be equivalent to 2.5 petabytes (or 2.5 million Gigabytes). For those who want to measure it in more palatable units, that's roughly 3 million hours of TV shows . No wonder why it's such an energy suck : with only 3% of our body mass, it uses 20% of the body's total blood supply and 25% of its oxygen. Our brain is what made us competitive in nature, what's allowed us to increase our standard of living, and what facilitated the domination of the elements for the exclusive and selfish benefit of our kin. And maybe, too, for the benefit of one or two super lucky chosen species that we like over the rest of the animal kingdom because we happened to breed them to our liking. But before we dominated the planet, natural selection was this randomized process of trial and error in which each species could get better generation after gener...

Is the  blue-dress/gold-dress frenzy  officially over? Good. It was getting crazy for a moment. The way that photograph made people realize that "reality" is nothing more than a construct concocted in our brains opened the door to the collective realization that what we see is actually just an interpretation that allows us to function in the world. We see colors under different shades a different way (the "white" tile under the table vs. the "black" one to its right) because the brain gets confused between perceiving colors during day and night. The "reality" is that they are exactly the same color once you apply the same light intensity. This differentiation needs to occur in our brain; a  mental shortcut  happening in our left hemisphere (the one that connects the past with the present ) tells us that colors look different under the shadows, and shapes  our perception mechanisms to make better decisions in the environments we live in...

If we could plot "global anxiety over the end of times" (the end of human times, that is) on a time series graph, I would say that now we would be at --or close to-- an all-time high. Typhoon Yolanda's epic size and strength is indeed a reminder of how insignificant we are, which definitely does not help to calm that feeling of impending doom. End-of-the-world anxiety takes different forms. Economically speaking, the specter  deflation  is one of them. The New Normal , or the idea that we have reached a point from whence we will never achieve the growth rates of yesteryear is another. This idea, defined as a statistical regime change, can also be described as an inflection point, or the point at which the speed of growth decelerates going forward. In other words, the point at which the second derivative of GDP turns negative. The New Normal : The second derivative (the slope's rate of change) turns negative at L 1 The reason this inflection point occur...