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.

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 are some cool programs everyone reading this blog should try out:

Aptana Studio

Best free program to write sites with html, css, php, ruby on rails and even iphone applications

Webots

Best robot simulator. The full program costs around $3000 but there is a free version for the Rat’s life robot programming contest

Robotc

This is the best way to program a lego NXT robot. This is unmodified c with a straight forward interface to inputs and outputs. This is the only program that’s not free (1 month trial) and it’s only $30

Dev C++

The best free all platform program to write c and c++ code

Autostitch

Best (free program) for making panoramic pictures from a group of pictures

Wow, I haven’t written in a month. After passing through the biology section in my library (I’m always in the engineering, physics, computer science sections) I thought about looking for any theoretical biology/alife books that might be there and I wasn’t dissapointed; I found a book called Into the cool. It was a great read and it made me think about how this could be applied to obtain emergence, to make artificial ecosystems. Doing this could make a new kind of technology; one that doesn’t get ideas from biology but from an artificial biology embeded in technology itself.  For some reason the author doesn’t talk about this but he talks about a really relevant issue; having a unified understanding of biology might be the key to stopping global warming and predicting the effects of other enviromental issues/disasters.

But I also have a few issues with the book; it’s too repetitive, it doesn’t have a lot of diagrams and no equations (it’s for the “lay reader”; come on, if your found out about this book you are looking for more than an essay) and the authors seem to have an implicit dislike of biological simulations and as I explained above they “might” be usefull.

The book’s official site is here: http://www.intothecool.com/  

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.

Seed magazine has an excellent article on the Blue brain project; a project that has model one cortical column of a rat and plans to simulate the whole brain of a rat + an animat body and then a human brain. The simulation is done to get a model to check results with, to use it for engineering purposes and to understand the brain. Modeling something we don’t know about that much to understand it; doesn’t that sound like an alife approach?

I just found Karl’s Sims classic video explaining the creatures he came up with using the connection machine.

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!

I just found a great posting on you tube. It’s an episode of Horizon, an old BBC series, about alife. It describes most of the things from Steven Levi’s book: Artificial life: the quest for a new creation. I was disapointed Tom Ray was not included.

I know I haven’t posted anything in a while; that’s because I decided to stop trying to post things every 4 days. It was lowering the quality of the content and it was a waste of time considering how busy I am with University. So from now on I’ll keep posting stuff, but stuff that I really find relevant for this blog.  

Here is an article about his on New Scientist:

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/mg19626335.500

And here is Tom Griffith’s page, the guy that came up with this conclusion. His paper on it can be found below:

http://cocosci.berkeley.edu/tom/papers/retrieval.pdf

The paper also explains in detail how the PageRank algrithm is “supposed” to work (no one knows except Google).