Monthly Archives: January 2006

A Speculist Milestone

Wow, check out these traffic numbers.

jantraff.jpg

For the first time ever, we have broken the 50,000 mark for unique visitors in a month…and the month is only two-thirds over.

Thanks for dropping by, everybody!

Crystal Rain…review coming soon

crystal rain.jpgOur friend Tobias Buckell has a sci-fi novel, Crystal Rain, coming out next month.

Yesterday I received an advanced copy and I’m impressed. Had I not just put in a long day I would have read through the night. It’s a fun novel.

I’ll get a full review up this weekend.

UPDATE FROM TOBIAS: “By the way, your readers might be interested in reading samples of the novel free over at www.crystal-rain.com (just click on ‘excerpt.’)

Tor has given me permission to post the first 1/3 of the novel up free as a teaser. I’ve been putting up a chapter every day or so, and I’m about ready to put up chapter 5.”

Ready to Be Courted

Will blogs lose their credibility if they get overly entangled with mainstream media and political money folks? Possibly. But what I’m trying to work out, here, is how I can get some kind of “courting” angle to score me a free pass to the AFC Championship next Sunday.

Come to think of it, sending me would be the perfect solution. The Speculist is neither a political blog nor a sports blog. There could be no possible suggestion of undue bias or influence peddling. Plus, since Invesco Field at Mile High is just a short light rail ride from where I live, no one even needs to worry about how my “expenses” are being covered. I can handle the light rail fare, and I can’t eat any nachos, anyway. All I need is that all-important ticket.

So please, anyone reading this who represents big media or big blogging or, you know, anybody who cares about the future of the blogosphere — not to mention, I daresay, the future of humanity — won’t you act now?

Thank you.

UPDATE: I just remembered. I have my daughter this coming weekend. So it’s actually going to take two passes to the game to save the blogosphere. But that’s still a heckuva bargain!

ITF #168

In the future…

…all clothing will be designed with digital media players in mind

Futurist: Robert Hinkley, who reports that his “prolonged recent silence” due to another one of those “pesky time wormholes.” (A common occupational hazard for folks in our line of work.)

God and the Singularity

2. The Question of Hubris

Last time, I asked whether those who are looking for the soft-takeoff version of the Singularity should focus on trying to instill a notion of goodness, in particular the idea of an ultimate good, into the conceptual framework of the emerging intelligences. Irrespective of whether it would be a good idea to try to do so, I don’t think we can make machines that “believe in God” in a meaningful sense. But a notion of the good, a good that is transcendent, a good that should always be strived for — could we make such a notion axiomatic for an emerging intelligence?

From a strictly practical standpoint, an AI hard-coded with a combination of the golden rule and Kant’s categorical imperative would be about as unlikely to go hard-takeoff on us as any being that can be imagined — assuming, of course, that it considers us to be among the “others” unto which it must reciprocally “do,” and that it doesn’t immediately begin formulating Universal Ethical Precepts that involve removing all the “organic infestation” from the planet. Failing a hard-code option, we can attempt to communicate these ideas to the new intelligence. If the ethical cure doesn’t take, getting the AI tangled up reading Kant might at least buy us a little time. Although with the AI’s million-to-one mental speed advantage, the operative word there is “little.”

However, instilling the emerging intelligence with a beneficial ethical sense is not the only moral consideration that we have to look at when exploring the relationship between God and the Singularity. The over-arching issue is the moral character of the Singularity itself. Is the Singularity a moral event?

It's a New Phil, Week 2

I weighed in this morning at 285 pounds, representing a total weight loss of 12 pounds.

All I have to do is lose 12 pounds 7 more times and I’ll be just over the 200 pound mark. I have decided to put off deciding what my final target weight should be until I’m in that neighborhood. Reader “Ross the Heartless Conservative” suggested that I should have fudged my starting weight up to 300 so that when I hit the target of 150, I can brag that I lost 150 pounds. That’s a great idea, but I’m not sure that I will want to go quite as low as 150.

The goal is to come out of this thing looking more like this than, say, this.

It’s a New Phil, Week 2

I weighed in this morning at 285 pounds, representing a total weight loss of 12 pounds.

All I have to do is lose 12 pounds 7 more times and I’ll be just over the 200 pound mark. I have decided to put off deciding what my final target weight should be until I’m in that neighborhood. Reader “Ross the Heartless Conservative” suggested that I should have fudged my starting weight up to 300 so that when I hit the target of 150, I can brag that I lost 150 pounds. That’s a great idea, but I’m not sure that I will want to go quite as low as 150.

The goal is to come out of this thing looking more like this than, say, this.

Medical Fab, Part 3

Scientists in London have developed a new way to print biological structures smaller than the ink jet needles they use in the printer.

The problem was that the smallest ink jet needles are currently 500 microns – larger than what is needed to lay down cells with the kind of precision necessary to make the smallest biological structures with fine features. But by using a new technique they are calling “electrohydrodynamic jetting” they can do much better. They send living cells at a controlled flow rate into the ink jet needle, but then add an electric charge.

The advantage of this method compared to conventional ink-jet technology is that it can create droplets as small as just a few microns across from needles with diameters as large as hundreds of microns. Until now, however, researchers were unsure if the high voltages required for this technique would damage living cells. Jayasinghe and co-workers have demonstrated that cells can be processed at electric fields as high as 30 kilovolts without being harmed.

Imagine microsurgery where the surgeon (or, more likely, a computer under supervision), literally rebuilds a damaged or worn out organ.

Just Checking, Part 2

Last month we reported on efforts to check whether the cosmological constant is really constant. We have a preliminary report:

Schaefer decided to test this [cosmological constant] idea by probing deeper back in time, to see if the constant was the same way back then. He did this by studying objects called gamma-ray bursts…

Early results from Schaefer’s study of the movements of gamma-ray bursts suggest that dark energy is different far out in space, and therefore way back in time.

This could explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Maybe it’s not dark energy or vacuum energy. Maybe the nature of space is changing.