Speculistic Goodness

By | June 22, 2010
1 Comment

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  • Rudy Rucker’s award-winning Ware Tetraology now available free: link

    ware.jpg

  • IEET Chair Nick Bostrom discusses the Great Silence (Fermi paradox) with Robert Lawrence Kuhn link
  • Social cost of disproving Euclidean geometry higher than three 19th cent thinkers willing to pay. Book: 5th Postulate link

    Scientists have not always lived up to Thomas Jefferson’s ideal, “we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

  • PopMech
    Here are our [Popular Mechanics] 9 summer flick picks, selected for quality VFX, hardware and science (OK, & plots):

    I’d add Iron Man 2, A-Team, and Toy Story 3.

    UPDATE: The kids reminded me about Shrek 4. That was a fun movie too. I’ve not seen it yet, but the word on the new Karate Kid has also been positive.

  • Richard MacManus reports, “Ray Kurzweil just got mobbed by a group of beautiful, smart women. I need to write a book.”

    For some reason geeks with groupies makes me smile.

  • XiXiDu
    The Surprises Never End: The Ulam Spiral of Primes link

    Cosmic Easter Egg?

  • “The Singularity movement is no place for uncritical, facile technophilia.” link

    Optimism should be based on reason.

  • Google command line tricks. link
  • Matthew Gevans, “Finished 1st draft of my paper on Singularity. Long way to go. Constructive criticism is appreciated.” link

    Here’s a chance to encourage a serious Singularitarian scholar.

  • “chemical is the first ever discovered that activates the telomerase enzyme gene without killing the cells.” link
  • Plastic Antibodies Save the Lives of Mice, Are Humans Next?
  • B&N, Amazon Cut E-Reader Prices. Unmentioned elephant in room – iPad. link

    Electronic paper is easy on the eyes, but Apple’s Retina Display is just so much more functional.

  • “Always listen to the experts. They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.” ~ Robert Heinlein
  • Roger Ebert: “Pixar is the first studio that is a movie star.”

    Toy Story 3 was incredible. A must-see even if you don’t have kids. But I think Ebert is forgetting that in its animation hay-day, the Disney-brand had similar drawing power.

  • John Scalzi, “Listening to a radio station in Christchurch, New Zealand. BECAUSE I CAN. The future is awesome.”
  • Mike Anissimov, “Why Arguments Against Mind Uploading Don’t Work — Constant Neural Molecular Turnover: link

    If a person uploaded themselves to a computer, would they make the trip or just be copied? Michael argues that gradual uploading is no different from normal neural turnover.

  • The mega-structures of Shimizu – his vision for the future. link

    shmz.jpg

  • matthewgevans
    “No pleasure, no rapture, no exquisite sin greater than central air.” quote from the movie “Dogma.”

  • Ben Goertzle answers Michael Annisimov’s anti-Twitter tweet , “Saying Twitter sucks is like saying phone calls suck.” link

    Media like Twitter is what we make it.

  • BoingBoing
    Modern gadgets made in 1977

  • creating a working touch-screen display with graphene. link
  • Anonymous

    Regarding the Fermi Paradox link and discussion, my belief is that there are just too many unknowns and assumptions people seem to jump to when talking about alien life and its motives/modus operandi.

    Distance and time are such incredibly enormous variables that we may never get any reasonable answers to the question. I think its very likely there is intelligence life, but it’s very unlikely that such life is understandable/comprehensible to us.

    My guess is that if life is out there within say a 1000 light years, it is either extremely primtive or godlike in power and subtly. If that life is the latter type (say they got to our current stage 50 millions years ago) they would currently be at level so far beyond us as to make any assumptions about what to expect meaningless (think the singularity X 1000).

    The notion of ET showing up in spaceships or flashing lasers signals seems silly at face value. Humans of today are beyond the capability of proto-humans 50 million years ago to even fathom. Look at how much a minuscule 1000 or even 100 years has changed us and our technology.

    Conversely, if some species are out there right this very moment that happen to be near to us evolutionarily, the statistical likelihood is that they will be thousands/million/billions of light years away and we will never know about them.

    What I find fascinating to consider is where along the curve of evolutionary advancement any intelligent life (us or them) eventually peters out at due to diminishing returns. Perhaps at some point in man’s near future we will quickly accelerate to near omnipotence (ala Q in Star Trek) only to discover numerous other species all at about the same level and at a point to which any further advancement is incredibly slow or non-existent. Perhaps there is an asymptotic curve so that the difference between a billion years ahead of us and a million years is negligible, although both are so enigmatic and abstract to us now that we are wholly unaware of their presence/influence/actions.