Archive for the 'science' Category
Looks like we are baby-stepping towards the singularity:
An international team of scientists in Europe has created a silicon chip designed to function like a human brain. With 200,000 neurons linked up by 50 million synaptic connections, the chip is able to mimic the brain’s ability to learn more closely than any other machine.
Although the chip [...]
Right now Indiana University is hosting the 2008 North American Conference on Computing and Philosophy that opened Friday afternoon with a talk by Luciano Floridi, a philosopher of information and major European intellectual. He proclaimed the dawn of the Fourth Revolution, the Information Revolution. In the same way that the first three revolutions [...]
Over at a Sun Microsystems blog there’s news that Sun will be joining the effort to make an OS X-native port of OpenOffice.org, the kick-ass open-source office suite (link).
I’m excited to let you all know that as of now Sun engineering will add its support to the ongoing Mac/Aqua porting effort.
The MacOSX porting history is [...]
I’m a sorta-synesthete: all my letters and numbers have colors. Unlike many (far cooler) synesthetes, my letters aren’t really colored; I don’t actually see any colors when I’m reading, or just looking at letters. Synesthesia, even the hardcore kind that I don’t have, is pretty common, it turns out, and seems like an [...]
It’s happening again. In spite of myself, in spite of being sleep deprived, hooked on caffeine, overworked, and thoroughly overwhelmed, I’m getting excited about learning. All of my senior friends are turning in their theses (the ones that have them, anyway) and I’m feeling really inspired. Even though I’m probably at least [...]
I’ve been doing some catching up with my science-y RSS feeds, and one of the articles I’ve been wanting to read for a while is from Babel’s Dawn concerning the Whorfian hypothesis as it relates to the origin or language. It deals specifically with a study done with toddlers about some linguistic and conceptual [...]
Jue’s got a neat post today about an experience in a bio lecture that got him thinking about emergence again, and what he wrote certainly helped clarify some of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for the last few weeks. He talks about emergence as it relates to the alluring [...]
I’m coming home from another looonnng night in the LEGO lab, which was every bit as exhausting, frustrating and humbling as the last one. We’re making, with another group, a pair of robots that play tag with each other. This, it turns out, is not as frivolous or carefree as the experience [...]
I’m going to get to be second-author on the paper about the experiment we finished in my lab last semester, and that I spent most of the summer researching! And there’ll be model fits in it! ee!!
Tomorrow will officially be the first skiing day of the season for me, which is also very exciting.
I found [...]
A little while ago I posted here the question of what existence and physical instantiation have in common, and recently the Times ran a piece about emergence and free will (now behind a paywall, grumble grumble), which got me (and Jue, too) thinking about this stuff some more. I think I’m sort of [...]
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