Darwinian security

Here is a video describing new findings from the a new field called Darwinian security: how to apply evolutionary anthropology to national (mostly US) security. Here is the official website for the book.

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.

Hydraulic Flight Simulator

This is one of the most original ideas I have seen in a while. It’s also an example of a usefull analog computer used after the 1950s. Below are parts 1 and 2 of the video in the website showing most of the information about the device (there are no papers or plans there) . The website is here.

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.

Google’s top ten videos

Here is a list of the ten google videos of 2006 chosen by Google’s Research blog.