SpaceX is going to land a rocket on a 'spaceport' barge!
Wednesday 17 December 2014
Friday 28 November 2014
Flying Car? VTOL Electric Silent
...and it can charge itself if you leave it parked pointed into the wind.
In the 2nd link it flies.
Monday 24 November 2014
Mind Reading becoming Mainstream
Image
Wednesday 19 November 2014
Radical new economic system will emerge from collapse of capitalism
Thursday 16 October 2014
Tuesday 5 August 2014
Nasa validates 'impossible' space drive
Extraordinary claims and all that, but this is validated 3 times now - Nasa validates 'impossible' space drive: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-07/31/nasa-validates-impossible-space-drive
(image:http://staus.deviantart.com/art/Warp-Drive-120823719)
Monday 28 July 2014
Anyone for Shogoth?
Nasty!
Researchers Create Walking, Muscle-Powered Biobots | TechCrunch
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/02/researchers-create-walking-muscle-powered-biobots/
Image:http://zero-mostel.deviantart.com/art/Shoggoth-Summoning-circle-151303021
Defensive Shields
I can imagine the same technology being used for solar sails while in space, or within an atmosphere magnetic control of the plasma could be used to reduce drag or even generate thrust.
Magnetic bubble may give space probes a soft landing - space - 03 July 2014 - New Scientist
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329763.100-magnetic-bubble-may-give-space-probes-a-soft-landing.html
Waiting for Dark: The quest for Untraceable Money
Inside Two Anarchists' Quest for Untraceable Money | WIRED
http://www.wired.com/2014/07/inside-dark-wallet/
The Pitchforks Are Coming…
'we reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn't have to make up the difference.'
Nick Hanauer - POLITICO Magazine
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014.html
Thursday 3 July 2014
Enlightenment Sandwich
Base human participation in the destiny of intelligent life has an expiration date.
We tend to assume that history produces a ratcheting in our level of understanding. That we are on a journey out of a Cro-Magnon Eden of blissful ignorance towards a state of enlightened nirvana. However a population with at least some individuals equipped with theories that explain their world might be a mere fleeting phase - so very Nineteenth Century.
Once technology produces artifacts beyond our capacity for comprehension we will enter a second dark age. These artifacts will be the product of genetic algorithms, simulated evolution or AIs out-thinking us.
The Renaissance, Enlightenment and the Modern age are likely bacon, lettuce and tomato, sandwiched between two thick slices of ignorance.
Are computers coming up with answers we cannot understand?
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/04/are-computer-coming-up-with-answers-we-cannot-understand.html
Machine Ethics - Three Laws of Robotics
image:http://naxnaviii.deviantart.com/
The Robot Car of Tomorrow May Just Be Programmed to Hit You | Autopia | WIRED
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-robot-car-of-tomorrow-might-just-be-programmed-to-hit-you/
Monday 16 June 2014
Rats Regret Making the Wrong Decision
(Image:http://beeju.deviantart.com/art/Remy-s-Limitations-115965922)
Evidence pointing to a merely quantitate, rather than qualitative, difference between us and other animals continues to arrive.
Friday 13 June 2014
Computer passes Turing Test
On any timeline stretching from NOW to SINGULARITY, 'computer passes turing test' would definitely have been down as a significant milestone. It looks like we have #BeenThereDoneThat now!
Next up Quantum Computers and Uploading!
Computer passes 'Turing Test' for the first time after convincing users it is human.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10884839/Computer-passes-Turing-Test-for-the-first-time-after-convincing-users-it-is-human.html
Saturday 10 May 2014
Incandescence - Greg Egan
Incandescence is very dry, overly technical, and a lot of the physics is frankly over my head... all in all a nearly perfect book!
In this universe life in the Milky Way evolved from chemistry on eleven separate occasions. These replicators, or at least their precursors, ricocheted around the galaxy. Meteor impacts, stellar tress pas, tidal disruption, and supernova propelled shrapnel, all serving to mix and scatter life across thousands of worlds. The Amalgam is the resultant climax civilisation descended from the eleven unique Panspermia roots. The Aloof are a mysterious civilisation sitting at the bottom of the gravity-well in the chaotic bulge that surrounds the galaxy's central colossal black hole.
Thursday 1 May 2014
I think therefore I scam
'Guided cognition' fits facts top down to an existing belief rather than deducing truth bottom up from the facts. Sadly, but predictably this seems to be the default mode of human reasoning.
http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid
Friday 21 March 2014
Quantum Qualia?
Genuine progress on the Hard Problem of consciousness? Maybe.
A proposal that avoids issues with the reductionist position that experience of consciousness emerges from complexity in the physical world. Then goes further: offering a plausible substrate from which both a physical reality and a subjective mind can arise, and a mechanism for a casual communication between them.
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/penrose-hameroff/quantumcomputation.html
http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/consciousconnection.htm
Thursday 20 March 2014
Consciousness more than an epi-phenomenon
image: http://a-parrot.deviantart.com/art/Le-grand-voyage-150205353
"It is worth contemplating that, though an evolutionary player Y is so easily beaten.. ..it is exactly evolution, on the hugely larger canvas of DNA-based life, that ultimately has produced X, the player with the mind."
Wednesday 19 March 2014
Friday 14 March 2014
X Particle Explains Dark Matter and Antimatter at the Same Time
Nice and neat idea.
"After all the particles and anti-particles that could find each other collided and eliminated each other, the universe was left with some extra neutrons and a corresponding number of extra anti-dark matter particles."
With Spin Foams and Hologram inscribed event horizons, this is likely more a handy mnemonic, something like "The Left Hand Rule for Motors", than an illumination of the Universe's fundamental truths.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/x-particle/
Monday 10 March 2014
Microtubules the "tape archive" of the brain?
Evidence for an unexpected new level of organization in the brain is slowly building. In addition to the possibility that quantum effects may be relevant in cognition, there is also evidence that long term memory is "archived" onto microtubules. Taken together these mechanisms probably increase the complexity required to accurately simulate neuron by a factor of a Million - postponing post-humanity, and delaying the Singularity by thirty years.
Phobias may be memories passed down in genes from ancestors - Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10486479/Phobias-may-be-memories-passed-down-in-genes-from-ancestors.html
Cytoskeletal Signaling: Is Memory Encoded in Microtubule Lattices by CaMKII Phosphorylation?
Sunday 9 March 2014
Is this life real or a simulation? – Matthew R Francis – Aeon
– Matthew R Francis – Aeon
http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/can-we-tell-if-reality-is-a-computer-simulation/
http://aeon.co/magazine/nature-and-cosmos/can-we-tell-if-reality-is-a-computer-simulation/
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