bascule

Now, if only humans contained superconducting electromagnets and large cylindrical orifices we could insert each others' heads into (please excuse the semi-intentional double entendre), we could do the same thing as an MRI machine!

Absolutely fascinating look at the mathematical properties of the human genome: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/10/fractal-genome/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/04/arctic-seas-turn-to-acid Oh my...

I prefer "outcome", but yes, 100% agree. Intelligent systems predict and choose from a number of possible futures. Evolution just kind of happens. It doesn't predict the future and then make a decision. Whatever happens happens, and that's what you get.

http://www.rollcall.com/news/39362-1.html Awesome. The letter says they're looking for a "robust, Medicare-like public option". FINALLY! The Democrats grow a spine. Seriously. I was soooo worried they'd half-ass healthcare and leave us with a bill that didn't cover all Americans (or couldn't easily be expanded to in the future). It looks like half of them, but Senate representation at least, are willing to make a stand. Bravo. I would hope this sends a clear message to the Senate Finance Committee, who recommended a more expensive bill for political reasons, that a bill without a public option is not going to get the 60 vote majority needed to bypass a Republican filibuster. Now perhaps the focus of the debate can turn to getting those reluctant Blue Dogs to finally pass the bill, instead of siding with the Republicans who don't mind that 10 9/11s happen every year because people don't have health insurance.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/10/08/alan.grayson/index.html?eref=rss_topstories I'd seen some videos of this guy circulating around the Internet, but, yeah, he's pretty damn cool. I think the Democrats' biggest problem right now is they can't stand up to all the Republican bluster and whining. These people have arguments based around untruths and they can't call them out on it. Aside from that they have no real plan. I'm glad to see there's at least one democrat willing to stand up to them. -usmvYOPfco Oh, and the Republicans demanded an apology for the above speech... are you kidding me? Grayson gave them one... he apologized to the dead.

Something which makes predictions based on a model isn't intelligent either. It's no more intelligent than knowing where pool balls will wind up when you hit them from a particular angle with a particular force. To truly even begin to be considered "intelligent", a system must infer cause or otherwise make associations/classifications based on an arbitrary set of input data. Systems that manage to do this are certain Bayesian approaches, Numenta's NuPIC, and to a certain extent collaborative filtering based on a least squares fitting, and the Markov Chains used by Google as the basis of PageRank.

I don't know, but if you randomize the contents of the RAM in software before powering down the system it doesn't really matter: the data left in memory when the system is powered down will be random garbage.

Douglas Hofstadter argues rather passionately that we do this all the time, even for people we don't love or may even hate, in his book I Am A Strange Loop.

Just a cursory scan seems to reveal the answer is: no. "This effect causes capacitance to build up between the transistors and the underlying substrate, originally considered a nuisance, but here used to replace a part outright." It has capacitors, it's just the capacitor is the substrate and not a specific component dedicated to the task.

It's still far too early to judge how reliable commercial fusion plants will be in comparison to others. Thanks to technological improvements collectively called the "smart grid", energy companies are doing a much better job of making use of intermittent energy sources, such as wind power. By the time fusion power is commercialized, the "smart grid" will have evolved considerably. I wouldn't worry too much about the usefulness of any technology, even if it needs regular maintenance that results in downtime.

Sounds like a false dichotomy to me. That's not what's going on here. Obama is peeling back some of the influence of lobbyists. It's not like he just declared lobbying illegal.

It doesn't need a hardware solution. Mr. Skeptic's solution: ...would be just fine. Before powering down, overwrite the entire memory with entropy data and you're totally fine. But still, "security" is an extremely vague requirement. What exactly are you trying to do?

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=news-000003216413 Obama continues his trend of doing something that annoys me followed by dome something totally and completely awesome. After immense frustration over the effect of lobbying on the healthcare bill, this is really, really nice to see. Now granted, these seem to be executive panels. This certainly doesn't spell the end of lobbying in Washington. But it's a very nice step in the right direction.

Actually that's a popular misconception: http://citp.princeton.edu/memory/

No, evolution is not intelligent. Intelligence is inherently predictive. Natural selection has no predictive power; it merely creates random variations and the fittest variations survive and reproduce the best.

(Note to mods: Why is this in mathematics? Might want to move it to Speculations) It's a bit more involved than that. First comes sense data and initial preprocessing by brain structures which occur prior to the thalamus. Then comes the thalamus and the amygdala. The amygdala are highly involved in emotional functioning. Not sure who this fellow is who you're quoting here, but he is correct that emotion can be evoked prior to cognitive processing by brain structures like the neocortex. However, emotion can also be evoked as a direct result of cognitive function, e.g. you're sitting on an airplane and realize you forgot to pack any underwear, which brings about feelings of remorse and frustration, and worry about having to find an underwear store as soon as you get to your destination. I think in most situations emotion follows perception, although emotion is tied to a relatively old part of the brain called the lymbic system and in certain cases emotions can arise before you even realize what senses caused the emotion. A sudden loud noise may trigger fear and that fear may cloud your perception before things settle down in your head and you can start to figure out what the noise was. I think the important take away is that there's no simple progression like "emotion, feeling, consciousness of feeling". Our brain is riddled with feedback loops. Consciousness itself can evoke emotion internally, perceptions can evoke emotion, or emotion can happen prior to even conscious perception. There's no nice 1, 2, 3 order to it.

This is what's known as an ad hominem. Whine all you want about Tegmark; it doesn't invalidate his paper. In this paper they pose a hypothesis for how microtubules could be shielded from decoherence, but that's all it is, a hypothesis. They have never done the necessary experiments to show this view is anything close to reality, just that it cannot be immediately rejected as wrong as Tegmark was attempting to demonstrate in his paper. Again, another hypothesis lacking any sort of experimental evidence. You skipped over this in my previous post so I'll pose it to you again: I would ask you to step back, look at your own beliefs on quantum consciousness, and ask yourself what additional explanatory power is offered by quantum mechanics in understanding the operation of consciousness that is not provided by classical mechanics. My guess is you're trying to make a "god in the gaps" (or in this case, "consciousness in the gaps") argument because you cannot entertain the notion that consciousness may arise from classical physical processes.

OUTRAGE!!!! Wait, what?

All I can say is: Oh my

Yeah, you seem... confused. The colloquial definition of solid state is "no moving parts". I suppose you could be using NVRAM to refer to FlashROM, which is, well, quaint to me. I have a Dell Mini 9. Its "hard drive" is a Mini PCI-E card with four FlashROM chips on it giving me a total of 32GB storage and performance far beyond what you'd get with a normal hard drive or even typical flash media like most SD cards. The entire thing has no moving parts and is completely solid state.

I'm unable to find it now, but a recent episode of the Daily Show had a Democrat noting that about half the spending on the new healthcare bill will go to private insurers anyway. That blew my mind.

If they did, they'd be labeled un-American traitors who hate the country and should move to Canada.

That won't help the boot-up time. If I were you I'd go for a completely solid state computer.

I think a better definition is the rather complex idea of strange loops, a concept defined by Hofstadter which are a form of self-referential feedback loops.