MPJ

It is hard to pinpoint the exact period in human history when the religiosity we are all familiar with today emerged and started to form itself with all of the colorful myths, supernatural stories, vivid deities, and numerous superpowered entities. It happened probably at some point around 10.000 BC in the same period of time when humans slowly progressed from being pure hunters and gatherers into the next stage of civilization and started to build modern settlements with domesticated animals and cultivated plants. No doubt, religiosity, superstition, and spiritualism existed all the way from the beginning in history when our ancestors started to paint cave walls, but only the Neolithic revolution and the invention of agriculture gave us enough free time to start daydreaming and to think outside pure survival. If we compare all previous beliefs with vignettes, we can safely say that the evolution of religiosity after Neolithic revolution began to fill volumes of graphic novels. Acc...

Sooner or later, computation hardware and artificial intelligence algorithms will inevitably reach the point of enough sophistication that the creation of a simulation of enormous proportions, for example, the size of the entire universe, will be effortless. So to speak. These gods-like engineers of such future simulation will indeed face a decision point regarding which degree of limitation to create for their simulated entities or artificial intelligence units in order for them to never reach the point of finding the proof that their world is in fact nothing more than just a series of electrical or optical currents of one inconceivably powerful futuristic computer. If created right, there's no doubt that the inner world of all those hypothetical units would seem to be as real to them as our own very reality to us. So, considering the state of obvious, the question arises by itself: if our own reality is such a simulation and we are nothing but AI units within some alien quantum c...

Genetics is, relatively speaking, a very young science. After the discovery of DNA only a couple of decades ago, it stopped being solely a statistical and psychological study of heredity, and ever since then it has been given a very important component in its labs: a microscope. In simple words, we are now able to dive more deeply into the world of genes and their government of the human body and behavior. In this short time we learned a great deal of human genetics and how it works. Many genes are already identified in relation to how we act and interact with others and our environment. Let's discuss some of them that already earned cool nicknames in relation to what they are capable of or what we think and suspect they do. The mixture of genes we own is given to us by our parents, which they inherited from their parents, who were gifted with the same from their own mothers and fathers, and so on. What is finally our DNA composed of? It basically defines us and not just our looks ...

I was very young when I visited Olympus for the first time. It happened during our early vacation in the region back then, in the eighties of the previous century. I vividly remember there was a dangerous dirt road with not much room for two vehicles to pass by, ending near one of the mounting homes with an embedded small tavern, which can really print on its portfolio, that was built on the top of gods' heavenly entrances. For some fairly strange reasons, Coca-Cola and Souvlaki on the tavern's terrace felt really tasty, just as the pure and clean water from the water stream just next to it. Unfortunately, and despite all of my efforts, I couldn't see or find anything divine, out of worldly items, or even a glowing, shiny rock. There were no gods whatsoever. Or naked muses. Or beasts with snakes instead of hair. Or horses with wings. Or mighty heroes. Nothing. Well, I was only 10 years old. What did I know... Maybe that pair of hawks we saw flying around the highest rock ac...

My great-great-grandfather was born in 1845, and he spent his entire life through the turmoil of the second half of the 19th century. Little is known about his life; after all, life in rural Serbian villages in past times wasn't really documented well, and literacy among the majority of people wasn't something our ancestors could be proud of. However, what was a major disadvantage for most people turned out to be a great opportunity for my great-great-grandfather. Beside being literate and educated, he was gifted with a human property only a few others possess. He owned a strong and melodic voice that would probably guarantee him at least a radio host job if he were born a century later. Anyhow, one of his tasks was to read newspapers, various dispatches, and communiques while standing in the center of the village square, surrounded by neighbors and people from nearby settlements. Soon enough, he earned valuable prominence in his family, and his children decided to devote our f...

Rarely do I get a chance and a real opportunity to revive an old article from the past and to update it to fit better in the present day. Actually, the quantum weirdness is still where it was four years ago—science is not something that changes over night, especially with quantum mechanics, so I am not going to update the post with any new physics or breakthroughs. Instead, what's new and what pushed me to repost today is one extraordinary novel in the field. The book that kept me from sleeping last weekend was "Quantum Space" by Douglas Phillips, and in short, it is by far one of the best titles I read this year. It is one of those true sci-fi stories that follows the real science and, in this case, the weirdness of the quantum world I wrote about in this post, and I would add one of those articles I enjoyed the most writing in the history of the blog. But, before a couple of my glimpses at the book itself, followed by my warm recommendation, and especially if you want t...

The 'X' is definitely one of the most important letters in the alphabet. Not only that it is the most valuable variable in all math equations and scientific chase for the unknown, but in the entire history of human riddles, and I mean not always related to math, it always marks the most interesting spot. Sometimes the one with the treasure. It was no coincidence that the old Romans used it for the most important number of them all. 10. The very base of our widely used numeric system. But we are not here to talk about mathematics or treasure hunting per se. It will be more about age. Of ten. My son Viktor is turning this magic number on this year Earth Day (April 22nd), and I decided, in addition to our previous topic and post Interview With an Expert , to fire another set of questions for him to answer. This time more general and within various realms of life and... well, stuff... So let's start with favorites. I guess they say a lot about personality. And they don...