Many philosophers portray the cosmic process as an ascending curve of positivity. As time goes forward, the quantities of intelligence, power, or value are always increasing. These progressive philosophies have sometimes been religious and sometimes secular. Secular versions of progress have sometimes been political and sometimes technological. Technological versions have sometimes invoked broad technical progress [...]
Because apparently he doesn’t know enough science. Thankfully UCLA, on the other hand, does: Your Thoughts?
I think much of the culture and discourse around the singularity is religious. I say this based in part on my reading of David Noble’s book The Religion of Technology and my reading of Robert Geraci’s Apocalyptic AI. Both are fantastic books. And I’ve compiled a long list of articles and books on technology and [...]
This account of how nuclear power works and what the current danger was remarkably clarifying for me: Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy Dr. Maddow would truly make a superb physics professor (you know, if she actually had as good a grasp of all physics as she has of [...]
The video below is extraordinary and hope inducing, here’s the YouTube description: The Japanese company Blest has developed one of the smallest and safest oil-to-plastic conversion machines out on the market today. It’s founder and CEO, Akinori Ito is passionate about using this machine to change the way people around the world think about their [...]
From a really interesting article about Craigslist and its enigmatic founder, comes this account of the maddening lengths to which spammers go to keep the site filled with spam: Captchas—distorted words that can be interpreted by humans more easily than by machines—tamed spam on craigslist for a while. Then it came back full force, not [...]
via Daniel Florien comes this fascinating account of the human brain and the energy required to run it: According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a [...]
Neat video on how YouTube puts out so much material that we can discover what people actually will choose among a myriad of options and model TV off of it and then on the reach of Google and YouTube’s role in that: Your Thoughts?
The idea of being able to eat delicious meat without it coming at the expense of poor abused animals is just too good to be true. Here’s hoping this kind of thing really is our future: A controversial cooker that ‘grows’ meat and fish by heating animal cells in your kitchen claimed first prize in [...]
While he was hospitalized a couple years ago, Daniel Dennett got irritated when people offered to pray for him and insisted that they thank doctors rather than offer their ineffectual prayers. The Wittenburg Door was appalled and inferred (quite unjustifiably) that Dennett did not understand that all many people mean to say when they say [...]
From MedicalNewsToday: Principal investigator Edward K. Vogel, a UO professor of psychology, compares working memory to a computer’s random-access memory (RAM) rather than the hard drive’s size — the higher the RAM, the better processing abilities. With more RAM, he said, students were better able to ignore distractions people who hold their focus more intensely [...]
This xkcd cartoon made me laugh pretty hard:
City of God argues that the New Atheists need to learn from history that reason is no guide to world-improvement If religion had motivated people to die for God and King, surely reason and science had made the dying that much nastier through the innovations of gas, flame-throwers, bomber aircraft, bigger artillery and the like. [...]
I appreciate Professor Harman’s willingness to exchange a couple rounds of debate with me across blogs against his stated desire to avoid such exchanges and so I will remain grateful to him even if we do not hear further reply from him. Here are his reasons for rejecting my notion of having a centralized message [...]
Graham Harman has an excellent (and lightning quickly delivered) reply up in response to my remarks earlier on the profession of philosophy looking into blogging as a preferred medium for more efficient and multi-vocal exchange. I’m quite grateful and want to address a few of his key observations and expand on some of my own [...]
Fascinating speculations from Graham Harman: Until very recently, the mere act of getting a book published was difficult enough that it carried a certain automatic prestige, provided that you weren’t publishing with some obvious fly-by-night sort of firm or a known vanity press. But of course there was and is still a certain hierarchy among [...]
Amazing: Thanks to Unreasonable Faith and Gizmodo
The military is developing technology that, when surgically implanted into an insect, would allow us to control its flight: Instead of attempting to create miniature robots as spies, researchers are now experimenting with developing insect cyborgs or “cybugs” that could work even better. So far scientists can already control the flight of moths using implanted [...]
Turns out that if you can’t get people interested in your Twitter updates, you can always get a 1000 followers for $87. Essentially it looks like a way to turn Twitter into yet another opportunity to send you junk mail from advertisers. (In addition to their attempt to destroy the entire point of Digg and [...]