Source: James O'Neill — August 1, 2007
Borg Pig credited to artist James Kelsey in this blog post by James O’Neill as part of the City of Seattle’s “Pigs on Parade” public art show. Here’s a video interview with the artist.
Source: Giulio Prisco's Blog — March 13, 2010 | Giulio Prisco
Geraci defines Apocalyptic AI as a modern cultural and religious trend originating in the popular science press: “Popular science authors in robotics and artificial intelligence have become the most influential spokespeople for apocalyptic theology in the Western world. Apocalyptic AI advocates promise that in the very near future technological progress will allow us to build supremely intelligent machines and to copy our own minds into machines so that we can… read more
Source: The Providence Phoenix — February 9, 2010 | Jonathan Donaldson
Yeasayer have created a decadent, densely produced mess of a second album. Like other bands trying to do art rock in 2010, they confront us with the irony that their world of genre-melding futurism (a/k/a Brooklyn) can sound dated from the moment you get off the plane.
This aside, Odd Blood is a sprawling trip through Yeasayer’s uniquely rhythmic takes on rock and roll, art rock, R&B, electronic,… read more
Source: Yorkshire Evening Post — April 29, 2010 | Duncan Seaman
“I don’t think it was a conscious decision to change any of our sounds, more that we have progressed as a band,” explains bass player Walter Gervers of Foals’ new album Total Life Forever. “Our tastes have changed. What we were trying to create was a record with more space and more freedom than the first time.”
The album’s title track was inspired by Raymond Kurzweil, the… read more
Wikipedia | Mae is an American rock bandthat formed in Norfolk, Virginia in 2001. The band’s name is an acronym for “Multi-sensory Aesthetic Experience,” based on a course taken by drummer Jacob Marshall while a student at Old Dominion University.
Singularity is Mae’s third full-length release and their major label debut. The album was originally to be released in April 2007 on Tooth & Nail Records like their previous… read more
What if there was a central place for all of humanity to text, tweet, email, blog and click in the essence of their mood in the moment? This gigantic feelings aggregator would provide a massive emotional pulse check on the planet that runs continually. Represented as a color wheel inspired by the mood rings of the 1970s, blue and violet would signify people being in cooler, calmer… read more
Seeing Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland in IMAX 3-D (which continues as No. 1 in box office sales for the second weekend in a row), I thought that the Jabberwocky poem came from the original Alice in Wonderland, but it didn’t. It came from the sequel, Through the Looking Glass.
Recall that Lewis Carroll was a professor of mathematics at Oxford University before he was more well-known as the… read more
On June 12-13 of this year, Harvard University hosted the H+ Summit, organized by the nonprofit Humanity+ and loosely focused on the theme, Rise of the Citizen Scientist.
I attended and spoke at the Summit and enjoyed it very much; nearly every speaker had something interesting to say, and one came away from the conference with an excited feeling that the Singularity is, indeed, drawing palpably nearer… read more
As noted in our 2010 State of the Future (the 14th annual report from the Millennium Project, just published), the world is in a race between implementing ever-increasing ways to improve the human condition and the seemingly ever-increasing complexity and scale of global problems.
If current trends in population growth, resource depletion, climate change, terrorism, organized crime, and disease continue and converge over the next… read more
![Chronic diseases and aging. The incidence of major chronic diseases rises exponentially with age, as shown: cardiovascular disease (blue squares) [data from (32) , cancer (red diamonds) [data from (32) , AD (gray squares) [data from (33) , and influenza-associated hospitalization (green triangles)"]. Incidence rates are normalized to the first data point. (Illustration: AAAS)](http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/Chronic-diseases-and-aging.png "Chronic diseases and aging")
A handful of forward-thinking biogerontologists has joined together to offer a new direction for aging intervention. Their commentary, published July 14 in Science Translational Medicine, presents the case for preventing what the scientists call an “unprecedented global aging crisis”—a sharp rise in the numbers of retired elderly in developing and industrialized nations across the world.
From both a humane and economic standpoint, a world with too many sick… read more
A new generation of biohackers is literally taking the future of biology into their own hands, and it’s raising some red flags with the government. The basic concern: how can we avoid proliferation of dangerous bioagents?
The situation will come to a head on Friday night July 30 at the Open Science Summit conference at UC Berkeley. Edward You, Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s… read more
The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published Tuesday a landmark paper entitled “Network architecture of the long-distance pathways in the macaque brain” (an open-access paper) by Dharmendra S. Modha (IBM Almaden) and Raghavendra Singh (IBM Research-India) with major implications for reverse-engineering the brain and developing a network of cognitive-computing chips.
“We have successfully uncovered and mapped the most comprehensive long-distance network of the Macaque monkey… read more
Eliezer Yudkowsky is a Research Fellow at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence and founder of the community blog Less Wrong. We discussed his coming talk at the Singularity Summit on August 15, his forthcoming book on human rationality, his theory of “friendly AI,” and the likelihood of the Singularity and how to achieve it.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working on… read more
