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Putting aside that cheery bit of news for a moment, another physicist recently said that even if that particular scenario didn't come to pass, the simple matter of traveling warp speed could kill you--all because of some stray hydrogen atoms.
Tags: Physics
Posted: 03-09-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
So now you might be tempted to just ignore the question, ignore the mystery of free will. Say "Oh, well, it's just an historical anecdote. It's sophomoric. It's a question with no answer. Just forget about it." But the question keeps staring you right in the face. You think about individuality for example, who you are. Who you are is mostly a matter of the free choices that you make.
Posted: 03-09-10 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
We humans tend to think of communication as solely about formal language—preferably spoken. Instead, animals use things like movement, posture and even pee—as well as sounds—to share concepts like, "I want to play," or messages like, "There's food over here." As long it makes sense, communication has happened.
Posted: 03-08-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The correspondents know what life is all about, but it would be dangerous to impart that wisdom to the general public.
Tags: Humor, Art
Posted: 03-08-10 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
A giant asteroid smashing into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs, a global scientific team said on Thursday, hoping to settle a row that has divided experts for decades.
Posted: 03-06-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The good news is, we can now control a pinball machine's flippers with our brains, as this demo at Germany's ceBIT Technology Fair proves. The bad news is, it's not going to make aspiring pinball hustlers look cool in bars.
Posted: 03-05-10 | 0 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
As she spoke, I realized why my instincts were so completely off. In my misguided empathy I had committed what William James called the psychologists fallacy, assuming incorrectly that one knows what someone else is experiencing. With this newly widowed patient I imagined that only a life of sadness and decrepitude remained, and I felt bad about it.
Posted: 03-03-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The massive 8.8 earthquake that struck Chile may have changed the entire Earth's rotation and shortened the length of days on our planet, a NASA scientist said Monday.
Tags: Science
Posted: 03-02-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
And now, just in time for Oscar junkies, comes a new statistical mincing of the movies that may someday yield an award category of its own: best fit between a movies tempo and the natural rhythms of the brain.
Posted: 03-02-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
The correlation exists not because smart people have necessarily rejected religion, but because religion is the “default” position for most of our society.
Posted: 03-02-10 | 0 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Nerves in the beaks of birds may not only serve as a "sixth sense" compass but are also magnetometers capable of measuring the intensity and inclination of the Earth's magnetic field. Researchers at the Goethe University Frankfurt previously studied iron-containing nerve branches in the beaks of homing pigeons.
Posted: 03-02-10 | 0 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The word information is derived from Latin informare which means "give form to". The etymology thus connotes an imposition of structure upon some indeterminate mass.inf
Posted: 03-02-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)
Posted: 03-02-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Physicists said Monday that they had whacked a tiny region of space with enough energy to briefly distort the laws of physics, providing the first laboratory demonstration of the kind of process that scientists suspect has shaped cosmic history.
Posted: 02-23-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A UC Berkeley physicist and a Nobel prize-winning colleague now in President Obama's Cabinet report they have confirmed one of Albert Einstein's most revolutionary theories 10,000 times more accurately than ever before.
Posted: 02-22-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Tiger Woods says his faith will be an important part of his recovery. From Kate Hudson to Keanu Reeves to Orlando Bloom, VIEW OUR GALLERY of Hollywood's Buddha-ful People.
Tags: Buddhism
Posted: 02-22-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus (often an image or sound) being perceived as significant.
Posted: 02-21-10 | 0 | WIKIPEDIA | GO TO LINK
British singer Elton John has stirred up a hornet’s nest and is sure to be at the receiving end of criticisms from Christian groups after he described Jesus as an intelligent gay man.
Tags: Religion
Posted: 02-20-10 | 2 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
He's said to be a Buddhist; I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith.
Posted: 02-19-10 | 2 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Schrodinger's metaphysics, plant intelligence, and bicycling into the noosphere: a talk with Rich Doyle, aka Dr. Mobius, the most psychedelic academic in America.
Posted: 02-18-10 | 0 | AUDIO | GO TO LINK
Intellectual Ventures researchers study flight dynamics of mosquitoes to look for novel ways to attack them. This video shows a technique called “Particle Image Velocimetry.” Tiny suspended water droplets, illuminated by a green planar laser, show the movement of the air around the mosquito’s wing.
Posted: 02-15-10 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
The results were very different when they allowed horizontal gene transfer between different organisms. Now, with advantageous genetic innovations able to flow horizontally across the entire system the code readily discovered the overall optimal structure and came to be universal among all organisms. "In some sense," says Woese, "the genetic code is a fossil or perhaps an echo of the origin of life, just as the cosmic microwave background is a sort of echo of the big bang. And its form points to a process very different from today's Darwinian evolution."
Posted: 02-15-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Praying for President Obama’s death has become a sick cottage industry for some evangelicals on the lunatic fringe. Bumper stickers, T-shirts, and teddy bears are sold with the wholesome-sounding slogan “Pray for Obama” but tagged with the more troublesome “Psalm 109:8”—which reads “May his days be few; may another take his place of leadership” followed by “May his children be fatherless and his wife a widow.”
Tags: Religion
Posted: 02-15-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Don't believe in the Man Upstairs? Atheists and agnostics want you to know that you're not the only one. And they've been spreading this message through a nationwide campaign that started last year. With the help of an umbrella organization called the United Coalition of Reason, local atheist groups have paid for billboards and other ads in about a dozen cities, including San Diego, Houston, Tulsa and New Orleans.
Tags: Atheism
Posted: 02-15-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Hawkins designed the technical innovations that make handheld computers like the Palm Pilot ubiquitous. But he also has a lifelong passion for the mysteries of the brain, and he's convinced that artificial intelligence theorists are misguided in focusing on the limits of computational power rather than on the nature of human thought. He "pops the hood" of the neocortex and carefully articulates a theory of consciousness and intelligence that offers radical options for future researchers. "[T]he ability to make predictions about the future... is the crux of intelligence," he argues. The predictions are based on accumulated memories, and Hawkins suggests that humanoid robotics, the attempt to build robots with humanlike bodies, will create machines that are more expensive and impractical than machines reproducing genuinely human-level processes such as complex-pattern analysis, which can be applied to speech recognition, weather analysis and smart cars.
Posted: 02-12-10 | 0 | BOOK | GO TO LINK
"He wants it to live inside Second Life," as she put it to me. "It will think and dream and everything." Indeed, the company's website now lists as one of its three projects, "The Brain. Can 10,000 computers become a person?"
Posted: 02-12-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
However, according to biocentrism, replicating human intelligence or consciousness will require the same kind of algorithms for employing time and space that we enjoy. Everything we experience is a whirl of information occurring in our heads. Time is simply the summation of spatial states - much like the frames in a film - occurring inside the mind. It's just our way of making sense of things. There's also a peculiar intangibility to space. We can't pick it up and bring it to the laboratory. Like time, space isn't an external object. It's part of the mental software that molds information into multidimensional objects.
Posted: 02-10-10 | 3 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A man tells his story of how he became unstuck in time and abducted by aliens.
Posted: 02-08-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
A Harvard scientist conducts experiments on himself with a hallucinatory drug and an isolation chamber that may be causing him to regress genetically.
Posted: 02-08-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University. This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world. No one is sure where this feeling comes from. Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.
Posted: 02-05-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Science of Self is a student-run university club. The two themes are science, or the pursuit of verifiable and useful knowledge, and the self, or the individual, and self-growth.
Posted: 02-05-10 | 0 | ORGANIZATION | GO TO LINK
We are a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to investigating consciousness and helping people develop their human potential to the maximum. At IAC, great emphasis is placed on the rational study and development of psychic and energetic abilities, especially the out-of-body experience (OBE), as a means of understanding the multi-dimensional fabric of our reality and learning how to live better within it.
Posted: 02-05-10 | 0 | ORGANIZATION | GO TO LINK
This led to another peculiarity in Blankenhorn’s testimony: Perhaps because he did not speak in detail about his own original research, his testimony lacked the authority of the plaintiffs’ expert witnesses. Instead, his language was strangely self-referential. For example, when he described the process that brought him from opposing domestic partnerships to favoring them, he did not recount a scientific study. Instead, he described a personal “journey” and “exploration” that required him think about social discrimination. “That was the big thing I had to grapple with in my own mind – to be able to look myself in the mirror,” Blankenhorn said. He ultimately concluded that “it means a lot to me personally … that I have been able to understand this” but did not clarify what new information led him to reverse his professional opinion.
Posted: 02-04-10 | 1 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
Even though all participants in Brown’s experiment expected to receive a series of “vague and ambiguous statements” that could apply widely, they all still fell foul of the personal validation fallacy.
Posted: 02-03-10 | 1 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.
Posted: 02-03-10 | 2 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
I drift, half awake, half asleep. Moving through the city I recall but have never been to.
Tags: Art
Posted: 02-01-10 | 0 | VIDEO | GO TO LINK
Needless to say, not everyone will be pleased by this argument. Those strong religionists who believe that the overweening claims of science (or scientism) must be denounced daily will not be pleased by an argument that says nothing about redemption, salvation and sin, and gives full marks to science’s achievements. (Smith, a pupil of B.F. Skinner’s, has been a sympathetic and knowledgeable student of science for many years.) And those materialist atheists who see religion as the source of many of the world’s evils and all of its ignorance will not be pleased by an argument that finds an honorable place for religious beliefs and practices.
Posted: 02-01-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
Viewed in this light, numbers start to seem a bit mysterious. They apparently exist in some sort of Platonic realm, a level above reality. In that respect they are more like other lofty concepts (e.g., truth and justice), and less like the ordinary objects of daily life. Upon further reflection, their philosophical status becomes even murkier. Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?
Posted: 02-01-10 | 1 | BLOG ENTRY | GO TO LINK
A former mouthpiece for the tobacco industry, the 85-year-old Singer is the granddaddy of fake "science" designed to debunk global warming. The retired physicist — who also tried to downplay the danger of the hole in the ozone layer — is still wheeled out as an authority by big polluters determined to kill climate legislation.
Posted: 02-01-10 | 1 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
MindSign has already helped advertisers dial in their commercials’ second-by-second noggin delight and has even assisted studios in refining movie trailers and TV spots: One of its “videographs,” mapped over a trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, clearly shows viewers’ brains lighting up whenever a monkey appears onscreen.
Posted: 01-31-10 | 0 | ARTICLE | GO TO LINK
 

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Monday, February 22, 2010 at 10:30pm (PDT)

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