Prime Stream
thescian | August 2, 2007 A while back I read an essay on Artificial Intelligence at TR by David Gelernter wherein, besides other things, he discusses where AI research stands at present (the short answer, nowhere). Like all discussions on AI, it inevitably led to the question of Consciousness. As always, I promptly got confused about it. What is it? Is it an epistemological impossibility? However much we try, will we be never sure if we have understood even a little of it?
I fear that I'll go diarrheal (verbally, with this blog post, you understand) if I continue thinking about Consciousness. I'll let you read…
thescian | August 2, 2007War, genocide
Darfur
Congo
Iraq
Climate Change, flood
China
India, Bangladesh
Britain
What shall we tell our children?
thescian | August 1, 2007
"..trying to produce such an extraordinary product as a laptop that is kid-proof and capable of working in jungles, deserts or the bush, miles from the nearest grid connection, and all for the cheapest possible price, has concentrated minds remarkably. The XO offers a lesson for laptop-makers everywhere" -link
Earlier posts on OLPC.
thescian | July 31, 2007What you have always suspected to be true is probably true. Intercourse and Intelligence at Gene Expression.
...intelligent people have lower libidos and less masculine physiques. What hormone is responsible for both sex drive and masculine builds? That's right: testosterone.
And two new papers suggest that testosterone may depress IQ. One team found that salivary testosterone levels were lower for preadolescent boys with IQs above 130 and below 70. (the same two groups most likely to be virgins in adolescence)
Another paper suggests that a gene responsible for androgen sensitivity and higher…
thescian | July 31, 2007Humans evolved over millions of years. It wasn't inevitabe, it wasn't predictable, it wasn't random either. It just was. It has taken incomprehensible amount of time to evolve the complexity needed in our neural clumps to hold reasoned representations of the world. Considering this biological history, it is safe to say that it will take imponderable time and much cumulative efforts to refine questions like 'what caused the world', and, even longer to interpret the answers. Future is an unkind place for those of us in the present. It's a mirage we'll never catch, a climax we'll never reach.…
thescian | July 31, 2007The Hindu on the Asian cup win of Iraqi team.
"In 90 minutes, 11 men on a soccer pitch thousands of miles away have made millions of Iraqis happy while 250 MPs, our government, the mullahs, imams and warlords can't provide us with a single smile. I hope this is a turning point for our country."
thescian | July 25, 2007A good overview of the hardware, software and the vision that powers the OLPC Laptop named XO. As the author says, XO pushes laptop technology to a higher level of harware and software excellence.
...development tools bundled with Sugar include the simple Scratch environment all the way to Python. Or that the music creation tools go from the simple but fun TamTam music box to cSounds, an advanced sound programming language used in Hollywood.
Also, while I was at the OLPC offices I saw a number of developers working on new and interesting applications and games for Sugar. These included an…
thescian | July 24, 2007What children need is a go-kart (OLPC) they can play with, not a 12-wheeled Truck (Classmate PC) that can crush them while scratching a teacher's back. While OLPC focusses on fun and appropriate user interfaces for children, Classmate PC seems to pride itself on Teacher control, parental control, piss control and poo control. (What the fuck. There's more important things at hand, dammit. Where did you go for a learning? Bootcamp for Straightjackets? And, what the hell do children need M$ Office or OpenOffice for? Please don't tell me you'll teach them to make Office Presentations).
Business…
thescian | July 23, 2007Noah Feldman on the contradictions of a religious community facing modernity in NY Times. If you read an essay on the contradictions of orthodoxy by anyone at any time in history, you will find the same themes discussed. Ignorance empowered by authority will always be at odds with Science, regardless of how well they've learnt to split hair and write finer points on the margins of oversized books.
Couldn't the contradictory world from which we sprang be just as rich and productive as the contradictory life we actually live? Would it really, truly, have made all that much difference? Isn't…
thescian | July 22, 2007Amit Varma writes in India Uncut blog:
Pratibha Tai will also not let India's traditional sciences wither away just because they are nonsense. (What kind of silly reason is that anyway?) Consider astrology: Just last year, while launching an astrology website that she surely knew would succeed, she said, "Astrology is a serious and deep subject which has a great influence on our society. The growing expectations of the people from this subject requires application of science and technology."
India's president is a ceremonial post. But, you can expect the new president to advance the cause of…
thescian | July 19, 2007Beebs reports on cars developed by universities to compete in DARPA's Grand Challenge. Checkout the cool video on the page.
thescian | July 17, 2007Details at ars technica
Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time. Yes, Redmond wants to own the patent on the mother of all adware.
Have you tried Ubuntu, the free alternative to Microsoft Windows?
thescian | July 16, 2007Beebs reports of the recent case here in the UK. A school girl joins a chastity club and wears a ring that marks her chastity to school. School asks her not to be so snotty and chastizes (oh, sweet pun) her.
Lydia Playfoot was told by Millais School in Horsham, West Sussex, to remove her ring - which symbolises chastity - or face expulsion.
The school denied breaching her human rights, insisting the ring was not an essential part of the Christian faith.
Miss Playfoot filed a case against the school's faithless stand and lost.
Teenage pregnancies is a serious problem in the UK. A religious…
thescian | July 13, 2007What a horrible farce.
The 15-year-old son of two doctors performed a filmed Caesarean section birth under his parents' watch in southern India in an apparent attempt to gain a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest surgeon.
The last thing a patient needs is a juvenile doctor with a disproportionate sense of his own smarts egged-on by his imbecile parents. And, what's with this Guinness nonsense? Isn't there better things to aspire to than a mention in a record book that panders to weird and crazy shit?
thescian | July 11, 2007Marcus Du Sautoy is making a series for the Beebs on India's contributions to Math [thanks Ramya]. You've probably heard the popular regurgitation popular among Indians: 'India invented zero'. Do you know why and when? [In Our Time] Apparently, the concept of zero owes much to the ancient Indian obsession with Nothingness, the religious and philosophical notion of pre-existence.
thescian | July 10, 2007Did life start from simple chemical reactions? What is the nature of Life? I was reading about these questions in an excellent summary of the current ideas at Scientific Curiosity blog.
I bought a book many years ago and still haven't managed to finish it: Investigations by Kauffman. Nevertheless, I did read the chapter on autonomous agents (translation: Life) and his definition has stuck with me all these years: "a self-reproducing system able to perform at least one thermodynamic work cycle".
thescian | July 9, 2007The first copy of my subscription to New Humanist has arrived. A few articles of interest.
Meera Nanda's review of Holy Warriors: A journey into the heart of Indian fundamentalism.
A C Grayling is in no charitable mood as he gives one Mr John Gray a good beating for being an apologist for religion and for getting many ideas backwards.
Sally Feldman in Clouded Judgement smokes out every historical, philosophical, existential, political and intellectual references to the cigar to mark the smoking ban now in effect in England. I am relieved to note that she does come to the rational case before…
thescian | July 9, 2007Shit, when suffocated (anaerobic decomposition), produces methane that can be used as fuel to power engines. The catchall name for this is biogas. Biogas projects have a history in India. As a child, I remember checking out a neighbor's plant in my parents' village. All the cow crap would be fed into a fermentation tank and the resulting methane would be used to power water pumps.
The Hindu reports on a trial run for a biogas project to light streets near Chennai. Instead of cow crap, this time, it's human waste. A remark I found as strange as it was insightful:
A. Mohan of Sundaram…