At any given moment, an uncountable number of events are happening, but only some of them matter to us. What does it mean for something to matter, and more importantly, what does it mean for u...
It's become increasingly clear that the Turing Test -- determining whether human interlocutors can tell whether a conversation is being carried out by a human or a machine -- is not a good way to t...
Time for the holiday message! Rounding off the year with a brief and casual reflection on some issue that doesn't quite rise to the level of a full solo podcast. And hopefully something uplifting.T...
Welcome to the December 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take question...
The story goes that Wolfgang Pauli, who first proposed the existence of neutrinos, was embarrassed to have done so, as it was considered uncouth to hypothesize new particles that could not be detec...
Game theory is a way of quantitatively describing what happens any time one thing interacts with another thing, when both things have goals and potential rewards. That's a pretty broad class of int...
Machine learning using neural networks has led to a remarkable leap forward in artificial intelligence, and the technological and social ramifications have been discussed at great length. To unders...
Welcome to the November 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take question...
Science has an incredibly impressive track record of uncovering nonintuitive ideas about the universe that turn out to be surprisingly accurate. It can be tempting to think of scientific discoverie...
The universe as revealed by physics is objective: it's out there, existing and behaving in ways that are completely independent of human thought. But the process by which we learn about the univers...
Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't qui...
Music is math that you can dance to. The fact that certain notes sound good when played together, or in succession, is related to the mathematical properties of the frequencies to which they corres...
Welcome to the October 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questions...
Certain features of our universe seem unnatural to us. These include "constants of nature" such as the cosmological constant and the mass of the Higgs boson, as well as features of the initial cond...
A characteristic of complex systems is that individual components combine to exhibit large-scale emergent behavior even when the components were not specifically designed for any particular purpose...
Getting along in society requires that we mostly adhere to certainly shared norms and customs. Often it's not enough that we all know what the rules are, but also that everyone else knows the rules...
Like any machine, bodies occasionally break down, and it's natural to go in search of a replacement part. Ancient societies featured simple prosthetics for teeth, noses, and limbs, while modern med...
Welcome to the September 2025 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). We take questio...
"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights, liberties, and responsibilities, coupled with ...
In a relatively short period of time, exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have gone from an intriguing conjecture to an active field of scientific study, with over 5,000 confirmed ...
