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Planets Around Black Holes

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/planets-around-black-holes/

Published: June 4, 2026 12:32

My mental map of the universe has evolved over my life, partly due to new scientific discoveries and partly due to my own education. As if often the case, as you learn more, things get more complicated. The simplistic picture I had as a child was that the…

City Planning and CO2 Emissions

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/city-planning-and-co2-emissions/

Published: June 1, 2026 12:30

In Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel he imagines a future in which most of humanity lives in gigantic cities, extending many levels underground. This leaves the majority of the Earth’s surface for industrial farming, necessary to feed all those densely…

Retconning Acupuncture

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/retconning-acupuncture/

Published: May 28, 2026 13:01

Understanding, at a deep level, the differences between legitimate science and pseudoscience is increasingly critical in our modern world. Science, in my opinion, is perhaps the most powerful tool humans have collectively developed for understanding the…

Privacy In a Digital World

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/privacy-in-a-digital-world/

Published: May 18, 2026 13:03

It is old news that all the tech we now live with is constantly gathering data about us. It is important, however, not to become complacent about this or to assume the situation cannot or is not getting worse. Pretty much every piece of digital technology…

NYT Epic Fail on Acupuncture

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/nyt-epic-fail-on-acupuncture/

Published: May 12, 2026 13:39

Dozens of people have e-mailed me about a recent article in the New York Times Magazine on the interstitium. The reason is not because of the interstitium itself, but because it is being used to retcon an alleged explanation for acupuncture.  The…

Pentagon Releases More Boring UFO Videos

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/pentagon-releases-more-boring-ufo-videos/

Published: May 11, 2026 11:47

If I were a UFO enthusiast, someone who believes that some UFOs (now UAPs) are aliens visiting the Earth and that the US government knows this and is covering it up, I would be really disappointed. I might engage in some serious motivated reasoning to…

Richard Dawkins Discovers AI and Philosophy

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/richard-dawkins-discovers-ai-and-philosophy/

Published: May 7, 2026 13:58

Richard Dawkins is a public intellectual of some renown, although not without his controversies. So it is noteworthy when he writes an article claiming that the chatbot Claude is likely conscious. I found the article fascinating, not because I agree with…

Some Renewable Energy Updates

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/some-renewable-energy-updates/

Published: May 4, 2026 13:29

I came across a few news items that I could possibly write about today and couldn’t decide which to cover, so I will write about all of them, since they all relate to renewable energy. The first is a new study comparing direct air capture (DAC) to…

Evolving AI

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/evolving-ai/

Published: April 30, 2026 13:45

I thought everyone needed one more thing to worry about, so here you go: evolving AI. When I hear this phrase I think of two things. The first are AI systems designed to simulate organic evolution. The second are artificially intelligent systems that are…

We Need to Ditch Gerrymandering

https://theness.com/neurologicablog/we-need-to-ditch-gerrymandering/

Published: April 28, 2026 13:38

It is long past time the US eliminated gerrymandering, the drawing of district lines specifically for the purpose of favoring one political party, across the board. This requires either a 50 state agreement, or action at the federal level. This has been a…