Purefold Discussions

Witnessing the launch of Immortality, Inc.? Going Back to Move Forward Anti-aging research is a rich and varied territory right now. Researchers are finally beginning to get a handle on the actual causes of aging. With this increased scientific understanding, some researchers now believe they are on the way to figuring out how to stop it, and—eventually—how to reverse it. University of California, Riverside biochemist Stephen Spindler reported on his research seeking caloric restriction mimetics. It is well established that restricting many mammal species to about two-thirds of what they would ordinarily eat extends their healthy lifespans. For example, calorie restricted mice live up to 50 percent longer, and experience less heart disease and cancer than those who eat as much as they want. Spindler is now screening a variety of compounds including pharmaceuticals to see if they mimic the effects of calorie restriction in mice. He presented early results that show that some compounds,... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

"The series, which will be made available online beginning March 2010, will consist of 11 mini-features each 15 minutes in length, created by independent filmmakers exploring diverse visions of what life might look like in an America of the future." - Tom Himpe from Bookmarklet

and what about purefold itself ? - skylendar

Yup - seen this, love it, but it's old AI tech. How would PKD look at AI these days? - zeroinfluencer

yes, and I'm suspecting it's will easier be easier to copy/transfer and augment than cut from whole cloth - meika loofs samorzewski

"And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia." <- I thought this was 'amusing' in reference to the project. - zeroinfluencer from Bookmarklet

So much of how we talk about transmedia centers around production, but so much of what makes transmedia what it is happens through new practices of reception and participation. Given that, I guess my question is: what does a transmedia audienceship look like? How is transmedia shaping how audiences form and interact, how they identify themselves and their cultural stakes? And conversely, how are the increasingly visible and explicit narrative interventions on the part of audiences shaping how we think about the way stories are told as they move across platforms, cultural spaces, borders of all manner? - Tom Himpe from Bookmarklet

This is the part of the whole Purefold idea that really interests me. I'm a longtime Star Wars fan who has watched the movies, read the novels and comics and played the roleplaying games. When I think of shared universes, it seems like the classic example. With Star Wars, of course, there are different levels of canon. The movies come first, followed by specific novels and comics, and... more... - Nathanael Mathias Christe

PureFold is the nearest thing I've seen to an aggregator of interest and of interests in events as-yet unseen. "Attribution has far greater value than cash in the bank." This quality of (r)evolutionary thinking makes it very difficult to wait for your Futures of Entertainment case study next week. - Scott Ellington

"The Italian magazine WIRED asked us to draw a map based on the scenarios developed by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto to help the reader in the net of ideas and hypothesis built by 7000 influencers from all over the world." - Tom Himpe from Bookmarklet

I'm on gwave search with:public Tao te ching, some invites available message me with email address - meika loofs samorzewski

This is a remarkable time in human history! We are simultaneously in the midst of major breakthroughs in biology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, evolutionary psychology, nanotechnology and fundamental physics. These breakthroughs are dramatically changing our understanding of ourselves and the nature of human society. In this talk we’ll look back at how we got to where we are and forward to where we’re going. Von Neumann’s analysis of rational economic behavior provides the framework for understanding biological evolution, social evolution, and artificial intelligence. Competition forced creatures to become more rational. This guided their allocation of resources, their models of the world, and the way they chose which actions to take. Cooperative interactions gave evolution a direction and caused organelles to join into eukaryotic cells, cells to join into multi-cellular organisms, and organisms to join into hives, tribes, and countries. Each new level of organization... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

Even in Nietzsche’s early notebooks of 1868, he was preoccupied with how, at the generic levels of organic processes, ‘becoming’ generates form but itself cannot be represented within the order of being. Influenced of by Friedrich Lange’s History of Materialism and Schopenhauer’s critical idealism, Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy examines this problematic as a relation between the principium individuationis, ‘the principle of individuation’ (the Apollonian function), and the Dionysian borders of individuation that allow for the formation of individuality but which, in themselves, are not definable. “This is the real problem of philosophy” Nietzsche says, “the unending purposiveness of organisms and the unconsciousness in their coming to be” (Nietzsche, On the Origins of Language, quoted in Toscano 36). - meika loofs samorzewski

From the Preface by John Hart: "As a scholarly work explaining the humanity contained in the machine, there was nothing like it in the entire philosophical corpus devoted to the machine, nothing [1958] that is, which combined a philosophical treatment with the same proximity to the technical object. The outstanding quality of Simondon's treatment is that for all the difficulties of crossing separated domains of meaning his writing is essentially, deep down, a work of praise." - meika loofs samorzewski

If there’s one thing all the future gurus seem to agree on, it’s that the democratization of technology has the ability to improve everyone’s quality of life. Access to information is really the first step towards self-empowerment. It’s very fitting then, that Singularity University, who’s goal is to harness the exponential growth in technology to solve humanity’s grand challenges, has decided to place some of the lectures from the summer session online. SU’s YouTube channel recently saw the addition of full length videos for the presentations by Bob Metcalfe and Vint Cert. Make some time for both videos, they are long but very informative. We’ve embedded them after the break. It’s unclear if all of the Singularity University lectures will eventually go online, but these two videos alone are a pretty cool freebie. SU costs around $25k for nine weeks of lectures, exercises, field trips, experiments, and discussions. The first year summer session recently finished with remarkable success. While you can’t get the same experience from YouTube, it is a great way to see what Singularity University is all about. - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

reminds me of the way pizza was made in Back To The Future - http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Tom Himpe

Should, by some terrible misfortune, Ray Kurzweil shuffle off his mortal coil tomorrow, the obituaries would record an inventor of rare and visionary talent. In 1976, he created the first machine capable of reading books to the blind, and less than a decade later he built the K250: the first music synthesizer to nigh-on perfectly duplicate the sound of a grand piano. His Kurzweil 3000 educational software, which helps students with learning difficulties such as dyslexia and attention deficit disorder, is likewise typical of an innovator who has made his name by combining restless imagination with technological ingenuity and a commendable sense of social responsibility. However, these past accomplishments, as impressive as they are, would tell only half the Kurzweil story. The rest of his biography – the essence of his very existence, he would contend – belongs to the future. Following the publication of his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, Kurzweil... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

Stephen Wolfram, author of the book A New Kind Of Science, creator of the Mathematica symbolic calculation software suit, and of the Wolfram|Alpha computational knowledge engine is a recent addition to the roster of speakers at the Singularity Summit in New York. - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

http://www.independent.co.uk/news... - Frank Da Silva

"3D printing has the potential to be pretty revolutionary. What’s your vision for the future? Right now we have a way of distributing and manufacturing products that is completely alien, compared to what people were doing 100 years back. We shop for things, often online, and we find the thing that most suits us. We order it. It was probably built very far away, and it ends up getting shipped to some other place and some other place and some other place before it comes to you. Well, it doesn’t have to be like that. You could just shop for something online, download a file, and print it out at home on your 3D printer." - Tom Himpe from Bookmarklet

And what about printing in colors ? - skylendar

and I've a schoolyardbully story written on this 3Dprintery theme keeping purefold in mind - meika loofs samorzewski

In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil predicts that by 2019 we will all be able to experience 3-D virtual reality through glasses and contact lenses that beam images directly to our retinas (retinal display). Coupled with an auditory source (headphones), we will be able to remotely communicate with other people and access the Internet. These special contact lenses (available also as eyeglasses) will deliver “augmented reality” and “virtual reality” in three different ways: They can project “heads-up-displays” (HUDs) across the user’s field of vision, superimposing images that stay in place in the environment regardless of the user’s perspective or orientation. Virtual objects or people could be rendered in fixed locations by the glasses, so when the user’s eyes look elsewhere, the objects appear to stay in their places. The devices could block out the “real” world entirely and fully immerse the user in a virtual reality environment. Thin, lightweight, handheld displays with... more... - Eric Logan from Bookmarklet

Tim: a glorified teleprompter :) - Andrés David Aparicio

This is a fascinating first stab at an algorithm to create a PageRank-like measure of influence for Twitter based on (duplicated) reach, number of people followed (the more people you follow, the lower the probability that you'll read a given tweet) and a mysterious "constant" probability that you'll retweet anything you see. Possibly interesting in terms of Purefold in that the author explicitly refers to "AIs that have Twitter accounts" in the comments. Do read the comment stream -- much virtue contained therein. (via Taylor Davidson: http://www.taylordavidson.com/hello...) - Mat Morrison from Bookmarklet

""[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."" - Tom Himpe from Bookmarklet

I want one... time to set aside a little money - Michael Bravo

you can get a MakerBot (see http://friendfeed.com/purefol...). They come at a very reasonable price, and are available again from mid October, although it seems they're in high demand and low supply - Tom Himpe