Curious George: How do I work my new shades? This is terriby silly. My monkey-mind cannot figure out how to work something very simple -- my new shades. Can anyone tell me the name of these shades, or better yet, how to reliably roll them up and down? more inside

Your dog hates you. God help us all, 25 stories. more inside

Have you ever wondered what a number (or other mathematical object) is? Many philosophers and mathematicians have wondered this same thing. (Don't miss the second link, great glossary!) Plato thought they were eternal forms beyond the physical world. Frege thought they were logical constructions. Formalism was promising but famously disproved by Gödel's Incompleteness Proof. There are also, if you can understand them, the intuitionists. more inside

Reality and Conscious Experience: Could I see red where you see green? Tailing off the "What the #$*! do we know" post. Often people wonder whether someone could have an "inverted spectrum", that is, where I see red you might see violet and vice versa. Some also think of so-called zombies who are functionally completely like us, yet have no conscious experience. Does this mean we have our own reality or that we have different perceptions of the same reality? If the spectrum was configured just right or totally absent, no one would ever know, right? Far from being weird -- these are questions that some top philosophers and scientists have been seriously thinking about since at least John Locke. The set of questions revolves around what philosophers call qualia. more inside