Argument against the singularity

After reading this article against the singularity, I realized the concerns I had about The age of spiritual machines were well founded. Basically they came from the fact that the definitions in the book were not objective enough (even more to include in his famous graph of increasing returns) and that you can’t use Moore’s law for other field’s (examples: lab on a chip, synthetic biology) and use it to explain our increase in understanding (true understanding like deriving maxwell’s equations). This blatantly obvious in artificial intelligence. Still for some reason the idea of a singularity keeps gaining popularity; the article in the first sentence of this post is from IEEE. So when you read about the singularity keep the above issues in mind.

“Surfer dude” comes up with TOE

By TOE I mean theory of everything. Suposedly this physics PhD that has no university affiliantions came up with a new theory of everything. Here is the Telegraph article. And here is a comment about what comes up in your mind after reading the article.

Go see the movie Sicko

This is another controversial movie by Michael Moore. Here is the movie’s wikipedia entry. Out of all of his previous documentaries I found this one the least impartial since when he goes to visit an “average” french family he goes to visit a secretary and an engineer. Otherwise the documentary is really good.  

Playstation 3 supercomputer

Dr. Gaurav Khanna made a supercomputer with 8 Playstation 3s . Here is his site:

http://gravity.phy.umassd.edu/ps3.html

He didn’t use the main processor for this, he used the graphics card! This and other projects point to the trend that consumer electronics are gaining performance faster than any other computing devices.

Here’s a good link on scientific computing in the playstation 2:

http://arrakis.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ps2/

This can also be a good choice since the Playstation 2 costs around $100 US compared to the Playstation 3 that costs $500 US. This could really be a nice project to try out. Not that I need to run anything fast (Avida maybe?), but just to learn about computers and to be able to say: I have a supercomputer.

Trump’s talk about Bush

I woudn’t say I like Donald Trump (he is a “little” shallow) but after reading his book The art of the deal he seems to know what he is talking about, and the video below is no exception: 

I highly recommend his book.