Their popularity makes celebrities easy to spot. Strangers, however, can also get mistaken for celebrities, resulting in cases of false “celebrity sightings.” In attempting to explain the contradiction, a University of California, Riverside, study reports that celebrity faces are remembered more precisely but less accurately.

Precision, in this context, refers to how memories for a particular face resemble each other over repeated memory retrievals, which can be likened to the clustering of arrows on a target in archery. Accuracy measures how remembered faces resemble newly encountered faces—or the deviation from the target in archery.

“What our findings say is that people might accept errors by misidentifying someone as a celebrity in the interest of securing a ‘celebrity sighting,’” said Weiwei Zhang, an associate professor of psychology, who led the study that appears in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “Our study explains why people are good and bad at spotting celebrities and highlights the importance of assessing both memory imprecision and bias in memory performance.”

FallenKingdomReads’ list of 7 Hard Science Fiction Books That Will Make You Smarter.

Hard science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction that prioritizes scientific accuracy and explores scientific concepts in depth. These books often require a solid understanding of scientific principles and can be a great way to learn about complex scientific concepts in an engaging and accessible way.

Here are seven hard science fiction books that will make you smarter.

Researchers challenge their own assumptions to improve sea-level rise predictions.

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes.

Delta is a backyard wilderness listening device to bring you the sounds of nature we usually miss in cities.

The founder of Rainforest Connection whose listening devices capture jungle sounds, comes Delta, a device for hearing nature in the city.

Slimy biofilms made up of bacterial and eukaryotic life forms have taken over an abandoned, flooded uranium mine in Germany.

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!

Summary: The more a person is able to synchronize to a simple beat, the better they are at synchronizing their pupils with those of another person.

Source: Dartmouth College.

How well you synchronize to a simple beat predicts how well you synchronize with another mind, according to a new Dartmouth study published in Scientific Reports.

I am restoring here some pages from the old version of the website turingchurch.com, which has been moved to Substack (please subscribe!). This is an archive of some old pages about the Order of Cosmic Engineers, a Turing Church precursor that was active before 2010.

See Chapter 2 of “Tales of the Turing Church” and references therein for the story of the Order of Cosmic Engineers.

Philosopher and science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon didn’t see the possibility of technological resurrection. Why? He had the building blocks for a physical theory of resurrection in mind, except one.

Stapledon was a deep, thoughtful and highly imaginative thinker, whose works are a source of endless inspiration for me. I consider “Star Maker” as a masterpiece of cosmic science fiction and theology.

In “Philosophy and Living,” Stapledon gives a cold shower (soberly and elegantly of course) to the idea of afterlife.