In a somewhat related note, according to studies, meditation may change brain structure and even gene expression in a positive way. Meditation might also reduce age-related brain degeneration. I think that meditation could be somehow related to the placebo effect as both have a mental process leading to a physiological effect.

From the first link:

"Our results suggest that long-term meditators have white-matter fibers that are either more numerous, more dense or more insulated throughout the brain," Luders said. "We also found that the normal age-related decline of white-matter tissue is considerably reduced in active meditation practitioners."

From the second link:

Eileen Luders, an assistant professor at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, and colleagues, have found that long-term meditators have larger amounts of gyrification ("folding" of the cortex, which may allow the brain to process information faster) than people who do not meditate. Further, a direct correlation was found between the amount of gyrification and the number of meditation years, possibly providing further proof of the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.

It seems to me that meditation could help with many modern health issues which are often stress-related. It's no wonder that many religions use meditation in a form or another. However, meditation doesn't really have to include any magical thinking, and the non-religious version is often called mindfulness.

Regarding magical thinking, I'd say that it's more important to recognize your biases than to totally eliminate them, as the latter is pretty much impossible.

I wondered about the headline too. My first thought was that how on Earth could you get 36 million people to fit into one second of footage AND process it in real time. Even the article wasn't very clear about it.

Also:

Faces are stored as a searchable 'biometric' record, storing the unique

It seems that the writer of the article didn't even bother to

You would have a pretty hard time looking for a complete decent song in PI, which would probably be counted as creative work and copyrightable. You know, you could create all the pieces of digital music ever created by enumerating all possible binary strings and using them as audio data, which would probably be easier than looking for the songs in PI, but still unfeasible. You would even get multiple versions of same songs in different formats.

Aside from just music, you would also get a simulation of the universe and all kinds of other interesting stuff that way. Too bad that we don't have infinitely powerful supercomputers :)

They were caught red-handed. ;)

Well, at least Linux users are still virgins ;)