I’ve always been interested in phenomena at the borders of what we know, where there’s some evidence but not enough to be truly convincing, such as UFOs and near death experiences. These are the kinds of things that, if found to be objectively real, would completely upend our perspective on the universe.

I always like having my perspective completely upended. So I keep a weather eye on such things, hoping someday for better evidence.

Gun enthusiasts frequently argue that only armed ordinary citizens could stop mass murderers. “Why didn’t the teacher have a gun?” they ask. No one’s seemed to offer a cogent response to that argument, apart from pointing out the difficulty of shooting only the assailant in a room full of panicking people. That’s a good response, but it’s not quite enough. Here’s a better one….Read more.

We already found seven super-Earths in habitable zones. It may not be long before we find one that has a gravity like ours and a tolerable orbital velocity…Read more.

It’s amazingly easy to imagine a super-Earth with a comfortable gravity. If a planet had eight Earth masses and 2.83 times the radius, its surface gravity would be exactly 1g. Read more…

Although Obama won the 2012 election by a large Electoral College margin, the popular vote was close, 50% to 48%, and the makeup of Congress has changed very little. Numerically, there has been little real change. It has been a status-quo election.

That said, some of the worst Tea Party fanatics have been voted out, including Richard Mourdock, Todd Akin, and Joe Walsh. Allan West appears to have lost, and Bachmann held on by only 1%, whereas she won by 13% in 2010. And some strong progressive Democrats have won, including Sherrod Brown, Tammy Baldwin, Tammy Duckworth, and Elizabeth Warren. At least we now have a somewhat better Congress, and we no longer have to fear that the Supreme Court will become even more stacked with right-wing judicial activists. Yesterday was a good day for progressive hopes. Read more…

The future isn’t going to be about making existing human abilities better. It’s going to be about enabling people to do new things – things we can barely imagine now. Read more…

Imagine a user standing at a table, wearing glasses, gesturing in the air, and turning in various directions with flowing motions of the whole body. She’ll both type and talk, depending on what she’s doing and what her workplace is like…Read more.

In this blog entry I explain how I derive my political principles from evolutionary theory. “In this election season I’d like to say why I think of myself as a “scientific progressive” — and moreover, an optimistic one. My political identity’s deeply shaped by a lifetime of reading about, and writing about, science. Let me explain how.” Read more.

I’ve put up three new blog entries, all of them about SETI:

The Uncanny Valley of Alien Technology

How Incomprehensible Could Extraterrestrials Be?

Will Extraterrestrials Understand A Message We Send?

Most of my readers know me as someone who writes about deafness, cochlear implants,neuroscience, and neurotechnology. So you might wonder, what am I up to in writing about astrobiology and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI)? Let me explain…Read on.