No, this is not about WWII SS, although it’s about another form of evil, maybe.
This is mostly a reaction to the sales pitch from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, presenting the new Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire HD at a much touted press conference yesterday.
I’m not talking about a new phenomenon, nor mere $$$, but with Bezos orchestration, which is just a… read more
Popular UK artist David Bent, internationally acclaimed for his vibrant portraits of fighter jets and advanced military technology, raises the mundane (rivets, tires and sheet metal) to high art. In today’s often impersonal super-engineering Bent perceives an unexpected beauty — intelligence, symmetry, precision, and even a very human self-expression.
His recent work includes a whimsical series of robot portraits. The Aerobots instantly remind you of children: anime eyes,… read more
“We are creating systems of comprehensive surveillance in which a billion people are involved and those people’s lives are being lived under a kind of scrutiny which no secret police service is the 20th century could ever have aspired to achieve,” claims militant digital privacy advocate Eben Moglen, Betabeat reports.
“And all of that data is being collected and sold by people whose goal it is to… read more
The tone of the Singularity Summit 2011 in New York was set by Ray Kurzweil, who presented many examples of accelerating developments, countering the arguments presented by Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen in a recent article, The Singularity Isn’t Near.
Robots vs. humans
James McLurkin introduced the concept of swarms of small, light, and cheap robots that communicate with each other, solve… 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
A spectre is haunting the world — the Singularity. All the powers of the old world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre — the Pope and the ayatollahs, the banks and the political parties, and “bioethicists” of both the right and the left. …
So says KurzweilAI transhumanist editor Giulio Prisco, who will give a talk Saturday (Sept. 22) at the La Voz De La… read more
Rob Prior | A short 3D film I made last year. I am currently putting together my second short film which will be named ‘Chiyo.’ Here you can follow the film’s progress from original thoughts, to sketchbook drawings all the way through to the final outcome… your opinions and comments during this process my well influence some of the directions I decided to take.
Video Source: Rob Prior
Related:
Chiyo: 3D Short Film Blog
Portfolio Website
Life on a Leash Website
Biologists at Indiana University have discovered why it takes two to tango. (Insert obligatory geeks-who-can’t-get-a-date joke here.)
The biologists claim their research shows that sex allows parents to produce offspring that are more resistant to co-evolving parasites, while self-fertilization dooms populations to extinction at the hands of their biological enemies.
It’s the Red Queen hypothesis, a reference to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland: “It takes all… read more
Source: Brian Malow blog & Time — March 15, 2011 | Brian Malow
Time | The Adjustment Bureau is just the latest film to be based on a short story or novel by Philip K. Dick. Science Comedian Brian Malow is a Dick aficionado.
Brian Malow | My newest video for Time is about Philip K. Dick and all the movie adaptations of his books and stories, the latest of which is The Adjustment Bureau, based on the story “Adjustment Team” written in 1953. … read more
Noted physicists Schrödinger and Heisenberg are driving around in a car, and Heisenberg says,”I think we just ran over a cat.”
“Is it dead?” asks Schrödinger.
“I can’t be certain,” says Heisenberg.
Heisenberg and Schrödinger are driving in a car and they get pulled over. The police officer asks, “Do you know how fast you were going?” and Heisenberg says, “Well, not really, but I… read more
For 3 days in late February, Russian businessman Dmitry Itskov gathered 500+ futurists in Moscow for a “Global Future 2045 Congress” — the latest manifestation of his “Russia 2045” movement.
The Congress featured an impressive roster of Russian scientists, engineers and visionaries, along with American and West European futurist leaders like Ray Kurzweil, Randal Koene, and John Smart.
As Kurzweil noted when I asked him about… read more
OK, I just made up the Facebook part, but IEEE Spectrum reported Tuesday on two robots that communicate linguistically like humans and invent new words. Spooky.
They’re called “Lingodroids” (reminds me of Stephen King’s even spookier The Langoliers, which were robotic monsters dealing with a “time rip”).
Researchers at the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology in Australia have designed… read more
The International Space Development Conference (ISDC), produced by the National Space Society (NSS) — the happening place to learn about the future of space — kicks off Thursday May 23 and runs through Monday May 27 at the Hyatt Regency La Jolla in San Diego, California. ISDC speakers will discuss a wide range of breakthroughs in space development. Here are just two that I find especially interesting. (Full… read more
At last, a potential worthy successor to Limitless. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, opening Friday August 5, is a prequel to Planet of the Apes — a reality-based cautionary tale and science fiction/science fact blend. Genetic engineering experiments lead to the development of intelligence in apes and the onset of a war for supremacy.
This addition to the series takes place in the… read more
Per my earlier post, I had the pleasure of attending the world premiere of The Singularity Is Near at the Breckenridge Film Festival. Based on Ray Kurzweil’s bestselling book of the same title, The Singularity Is Near is really two movies. First, it’s a documentary, in which Kurzweil lays out his argument that accelerating technological development is rapidly leading us to a… read more
