While my recent observation that Data Is Eating Us may have come off as tongue-in-cheek, the reality behind it is no joke. Most people aren’t (yet) transforming their basic bodily functions in order to have more time to analyze data, but there is no question that the fundamental dynamic between human beings and data is […]
Evolution of faces from random patterns using a reverse-engineered face recognition program. Cool.
Randal A. Koene at Kurzweil AI has written an intriguing essay in which he argues that the current competitive strategy of humanity as a species — which is defined by genes competing for reproduction — is bound to be supplanted by a new competitive strategy driven by information patterns: Pattern survival in humans is currently […]
You know, not that long ago, putting something like this together took a lot of expensive equipment and the efforts of several people: Now ANYBODY can do it. Well, not anybody. I mean, you have to be able to play Viva La Vida on the violin, and that’s highly specialized knowledge… Humanity is evolving rapidly: […]
As discussed on the podcast a couple of weeks ago human capability is exploding. There are two major components of this rapid growth. Our best-case capability, meaning the cutting-edge achievements that occur on the margins. Human capability includes every Olympic record ever set. It includes massive accomplishments such as traveling to the moon and building […]
Stephen Hawking says that our species has transcended genetics alone as our means of evolving, and that information external to us — the sum of human knowledge in books, computer networks, etc. — is taking us in an entirely new direction: But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed […]
Alvis Brigis says that it’s upon us It’s particularly interesting to observe the web trending toward advanced simulation. As I noted above, many of the web’s most valuable properties are rooted in super-simulations – massive bodies of structured data that can be viewed as a whole or sub-sections. It is clear that the major players […]
Humans and chimpanzees are genetically almost identical — there’s only about a 2% difference between the DNA sequences of the two species. So what is in that 2% that makes us so different? Exploring the Genetic Differences Between Chimps and Humans A new comparison of chimpanzee and human genomes has offered an early but tantalizing […]
Has been with us a lot longer than we thought: An international team of scientists has just identified what they believe is the world’s first known dog, which was a large and toothy canine that lived 31,700 years ago and subsisted on a diet of horse, musk ox and reindeer, according to a new study. […]
Jerry Pournelle offers not a defense of Intelligent Design, but a response to some of its harsher critics: 1. while many “Intelligent Design Theorists” are in fact fundamentalist creationists, not all of them are, and some like the late Sir Fred Hoyle are not creationists at all. 2. The panspermia hypothesis, which asserts that life […]