This never occurred to me before. But, well, identical twins have nearly indistinguishable DNA. Meaning that they make really, really good criminals. In Germany yesterday, two twins were acquitted from charges stemming from a multi-million euro jewel heist that one of them did. But since they can’t figure out which one did it (and the twins ain’t talking), they got to walk free. So it turns out that this has happened before: a drug-runner to be sentenced to death in Malaysia was set free because the judge couldn’t figure out which was which. I picked up this story over at boing boing, where a commenter Takuan made a rather interesting point:

getting back to establishing a clean, false identity to hold in reserve for one’s children; how about a “twin”? Not as good as a total synthetic, but better than nothing?

A while back we learned that it is mathematically probable that we are just a simulation.

Today I found out that we might be living in a hologram, basically our world acting as a reflection of something that is happening at the far edges of the universe.

And of course, last year scientists ruled out the slim hope that the earth would escape destruction when the sun dies.

Drink and be merry? Rage, rage, at the dying of the light? Actually, I suppose none of this changes anything. Who cares if we’re all 1’s and 0’s?

The headline alone is enough, really: Military Investigates Amnesia Beams. The short of it is that scientists have finally figured out how to selectively zap certain memories out of mice, and the military is quite interested. Apparently, since the 80s, they’ve known how to erase about the last 4 seconds of a rodents memory, but this is the first time they’ve been able to get older memories deleted.

Our heads, the hard drives. The military, the ones with the software to read/write. Hurrah.