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.
Here is Craig Venter talking about his biography in Google. He has used the term artificial life to describe his work instead or synthetic biology as he should called but it’s not entirely his fault: we should have called artificial life computational theoretical biology or something like that.
Just had another semicool idea that has been invented already. The idea was modeling wealth distribution using the same equations used in quantum physics to explain the electron distribution in different energy levels in the atom. I was wondering how come people talk about lower and middle class; can that be in a graph or something? And it turns out it can, just like electrons vs. energy levels in the atom. In this case the number of electrons are the population and the energy levels is wealth; stuff that can be measured approximately by salary. The energy in my opinion has to do with the money and time (time = money, therefore time^2 ) needed to train people for a higher paying job (ex. university). Ok so that was my idea. But it turns out there is a whole field that tries to use ideas from physics for economics: econophysics. There is even a conference on it. Here is an abstract of an article talking about exactly the same thing I said plus possible solutions to the problem!
The laboratory of intelligent sytems in EPFL (run by one of the founders of evolutionary robotics Prof. Dario Floreano) has very good multipurpose c++ libraries for artificial life; they are in the Software link under Resources.
There are also more general science libraries from GNU.
Here is a good article from New Scientist about black holes and the paradoxes that their existence causes when you take into account information. It’s an article with some conceptual information for a change; New Scientist has been getting more sensationalistic over the years with titles like: “The quantum secret of water” and just crackpot things like the Relativity drive; a microwave version of ”reactionless propulsion” (this might be possible but not in the way the article describes it) . Some comments from the editor about the last article are here. I remember reading popular mechanics and popular science when I was younger and learning something instead of reading 100 advertisements.
After doing a thermodynamics lab where we had to measure the area of a graph I thought we where going to have to scan the graph and use some fancy program to find the area. And yes there are programs for this. You can even use MATLAB (check this journal intro). But what we used to do this is called a planimeter. It’s two or one articulated arms that by moving the end of it around the shape you can get the area. A good explanation of how it works is in this website: http://whistleralley.com/math.htm. It also has some other “cool” math explanations. If they were to use the kinds of examples in that website in school more kids might find math usefull. But instead (this is just my opinion) they don’t get interested and they miss the basiscs and they just memorize equations and math becomes a chore; a hard subject.
As I was arguing today with someone, the average value of a random walk is not 0. And he wanted me to prove it. Well here is the true value of the average: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk. The gambler’s ruin problem (in the article) is a good example of random walk phenomena in real life (except for brownian motion). Here is a proof that the distance from 0 actually increases as time goes by: http://www.krellinst.org/UCES/archive/modules/monte/node4.html. If you go up the previous website you find this excellent website on Monte-Carlo methods:
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.
I hope you enjoy the blog. The picture at the top
of the page under the title was made by shining a
laser through a stream of water. There is more
information and pictures about it on my website
) needed to train people for a higher paying job (ex. university). Ok so that was my idea. But it turns out there is a whole field that tries to use ideas from physics for economics: econophysics. There is even a 