It looks as if the world was about to come to a complete standstill. Nobody knows that at this very moment, we are hurtling through space at an amazing speed. Hard to believe, since the stars don't look like they are moving. The Hunter hovers just over the horizon yonder, ready to shoot aimlessly at the vast number of bright gems studded on the...
Dear NotMarie,
As you well know I am following quite closely the development of your research and this retro-futurist idea of yours, which you have so aptly named the Artificial Intelligence project of Vague, Very Vague, or 3V.
I like it, of course I like it, you know I like it, but I like it like one likes a poem, or a sweet memory of an old...
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3976979749889442679#
Christopher Michael Langan (born c. 1952) is an American autodidact whose IQ was reported by 20/20 and other media sources to have been measured at between 195 and 210.[1] Billed by some media sources as "the smartest man in America",[2] he rose to prominence in 1999 while...
My grandpa has brain cancer and is probably going to die soon. Of course I feel sad about this. I see how it's affecting my parents, siblings, cousins etc and it seems as though they're all... more sad?... than I am. I want to feel really badly for Grandpa and his situation, thinking his $10 scratch ticket is a $4 million dollar winner must be...
Regarding the political letter writing campaign, to raise Singularity awareness within political arenas (and to increase investment in science and technology); at least two people I'm aware of have received replies from the UK Department for Business Innovation & Skills.
Here's a copy of one reply, published via the kind permission of The...
I know why there is a square root of -1 in the quantum physics equations, why things are waves sometimes and particles other times, why the double-slit experiment works, why there are bell-curves in quantum physics, and why time exists.
Start with nothing. Then divide the nothing into X number of possible states of the universe (ways the...
I wrote this a while ago for the LandscapeTechne exhibit catalogue at Little Berlin gallery in Philadelphia.
LandscapeTechne. The crafting of a landscape. It begins with the irreducible landscape of nature. There is a rich history of landscape art, from Romantic paintings to Ansel Adams' photography and Robert Smithson's deformations in dirt,...
What you think your eyes see is mostly a memory. People think they're seeing what's in front of their eyes, but the way we think while awake is more like a dream than what's in front of our eyes. I often look straight at something and don't see it because I don't remember it. Next time you see something unlike anything you've seen before, close...
By firing a particle beam into a cloud chamber, physicists in Denmark and the UK have shown how cosmic rays could stimulate the formation of water droplets in the Earth's atmosphere. The researchers say this is the best experimental evidence yet that the Sun influences the climate by altering the intensity of the cosmic-ray flux reaching the...
Abstract. A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online
payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a
financial institution. Digital signatures provide part of the solution, but the main
benefits are lost if a trusted third party is still required to prevent double-spending.
We...
We all need delusions to keep us going, but sometimes delusions just get too hard to maintain.
Thats why, at Pharmacorp, we've developed a wide selection of delusions in pill form.
We understand what its like living in a post-scarcity, post-magical, post-human world, and we're here to help.
Ask your local conscious systems...
If Einstein was alive today, he may experiment and teach people things much more powerful than nukes. He only spent time on things as weak as nukes (regardless of who eventually built them using his math) because he had 100 year old technology to work with. Powdered explosives are to nukes as nukes are to what? Airplanes crashing into buildings...
Just thought I would share an experience I had the other morning. While I was trying to sleep in, it must have been the way the light was shining in the dark room through a crack in the curtains that awoke me. My dog, now seeing that I was awake, hit the curtatin with her tail as shs made her way over to lick my face. But when she hit the...
Sometimes I sit back and think about what it means for other animal species to be alive. They hunt and they reproduce and they migrate and they just keep going and going about their business. The only species who seem to be messing anything up are humans, but, I will give us credit at least for this thought. What if there is no point to being...
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It didn’t go wrong, not exactly wrong that is.
I mean, c’mon, who could have predicted the consequences of a technology that seemed on face value so straightforward, so logically consistent with what we know, or as it turned out, thought we knew, of the way the world works.
The point, you see, is that whilst the tech was...
THE ARGUMENTATIVE THEORY
A Conversation with Hugo Mercier
Introduction
Last July, opening the Edge Seminar, "The New Science of Morality", Jonathan Haidt digressed to talk about two recently-published papers in Behavioral and Brain Sciences which he believed were "so important that the abstracts from them should be posted in...
Could Einstein's Theory of Relativity be slipping into the past as a discredited misunderstanding?
And could it be replaced with an intuitive and simplified scientific truth that was discovered over a century ago?
A major turning point in the public’s understanding of science came about a century ago, with the introduction of Einstein’s...