Siggi Becker › Likes

"In a study that elevates the role of entropy in creating order, research led by the University of Michigan shows that certain pyramid shapes can spontaneously organize into complex quasicrystals. A quasicrystal is a solid whose components exhibit long-range order, but without a single pattern or a unit cell that repeats. A paper on the findings appears in the Dec. 10 issue of Nature. Researchers from Case Western Reserve University and Kent State University collaborated on the study. Entropy is a measure of the number of ways the components of a system can be arranged. While often linked to disorder, entropy can also cause objects to order. The pyramid shape central to this research is the tetrahedron---a three-dimensional, four-faced, triangular polyhedron that turns up in nanotechnology and biology. "Tetrahedrons are the simplest regular solids, while quasicrystals are among the most complex and beautiful structures in nature. It's astonishing and totally unexpected that entropy... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

"The semantic Web has long been heralded as the future of the Web. Proponents have said that Web experiences will some day become more meaningful and relevant based on the AI-esque computational power of natural-language processing (NLP) and structured data that is understandable by machines for interpretation. However, with the rise of the social Web, we see that what truly makes our online experiences meaningful is not necessarily the Web's ability to approximate human language or to return search results with syntactical exactness. The value of the semantic Web will take time because the intelligent personal agents that are able to process this structured data still have a long way to go before becoming fully actualized. This guest post was written by Alisa Leonard-Hansen. Rather, meaningful and relevant experiences now are born out of the context of our identities and social graph: the pragmatics, or contextual meaning, of our online identities. My Web experience becomes more... more... - Wildcat from Bookmarklet

3rd October: http://twitter.com/siggibe... - Siggi Becker

picture: Ghost in the Shell - Mamoru Oshii - Ozgur Uckan

We should oppose to the possibility of a global e-police state with the "beauty within us"... - Ozgur Uckan

The topic of 2009: collaboration and criticality of social systems ;-) - Siggi Becker

«It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete. It refused to build automobiles that the public wanted, cars that got great gas mileage, were as safe as they could be, and were exceedingly comfortable to drive. Oh -- and that wouldn't start falling apart after two years. GM stubbornly fought environmental and safety regulations. Its executives arrogantly ignored the "inferior" Japanese and German cars, cars which would become the gold standard for automobile buyers. And it was hell-bent on punishing its unionized workforce, lopping off thousands of workers for no good reason other than to "improve" the short-term bottom line of the corporation.» - Philipp Lenssen

«Saving our precious industrial infrastructure, though, is another matter and must be a top priority. If we allow the shutting down and tearing down of our auto plants, we will sorely wish we still had them when we realize that those factories could have built the alternative energy systems we now desperately need. And when we realize that the best way to transport ourselves is on light... more... - Philipp Lenssen

«The products built in the factories of GM, Ford and Chrysler are some of the greatest weapons of mass destruction responsible for global warming and the melting of our polar icecaps. The things we call "cars" may have been fun to drive, but they are like a million daggers into the heart of Mother Nature.» - Philipp Lenssen

Nothing new under the sun, huh? - Siggi Becker

Classic inductive reasoning. Sort of reverse Kurzweil ;-) - Siggi Becker

"Let's have that discussion when we figure out how to fold a small protein or simulate protein transport properly. We are so far away from that, and there are a million things to do before we can even think about solving." - Deepak Singh

Exactly. - Maxine

How does this discrepancy manifest? - Siggi Becker

The ways are legion. Examples are the expectations of clients to be able to communicate with you at all times. Of changes being immediately reflected thus robbing you of your own time to refect on changes. Of education and educators being resistant to those changes. Of how we still build exclusively for an outdated family pattern. - Teo Sartori

"Singularity University aims to assemble, educate and inspire a cadre of leaders who strive to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges" - Pedro Beltrao from Bookmarklet

The list of advisors is impressive (http://singularityu.org/academi...) but overall it just looks like they picked every current (bio)tech hype and made some random text around them. - Pedro Beltrao

In the biotech track they plan to cover intelligent design:"(3) Intelligent design (ultra-rapid, low-cost DNA writing, selective gene manipulation/substitution, ethics of germline modification, RNA interference)." I wonder if that was a mistake :). - Pedro Beltrao

"IEET Fellow Marshall Brain gave this speech on the inevitable structural unemployment that automation and artificial intelligence will create at the Singularity Summit 2008. The astonishing thing about Marshall’s talk was the amount of outrage from the libertopians in the audience who were all perfectly content to imagine that we would soon have super-robots doing things a gazillion times better than humans, and that that transition might wipe humans out or bring about a utopian society, but they couldn’t accept that such a transition might cause unemployment and require any redistribution of the wealth." - Todd Hoff

I´s a mistery to me why most of these technotopians are so ignorant to the worldwide trends in inequality through technology. Every society t-n has to deal with the implications of accelerating productivity and accumulation of capital through accelerating technology. To only think about t+1 is the core of a major blinding ideology. Thank you Marshall Brain for doing a job most of the middelclass singu-kiddies won´t do. - Siggi Becker

"Technological transformations do not impress me, biological technology does not impress me, Internet does not impress me. I say this not out of arrogance. No doubt much of what we do will change if we adopt the different technological options at hand, but our actions will not change unless our emotioning changes. We live a culture centered in domination and submission, mistrust and control, dishonesty, commerce and greediness, appropriation and mutual manipulation ... and unless our emotioning changes all that will change in our lives will be the way in which we continue in wars, greediness, mistrust, dishonesty, and abuse of others and of nature." - Rainer Wasserfuhr

Passt super in Bezug zu diesem LeMöhre/Arrington-Mist. - Siggi Becker

Interesting article comparing with JW. probably the same comparison could be applied to all religions that are hierarchical - i.e. a pyramid with a God ( or Gods ) at the top. [ replace the word God with supreme being if you feel uncomfortable.....] - SnakeDoc

While attending SS08 it dawned on me that the Singularity - a point on the 21st century timeline when problem-solving abilities of AI systems surpass human minds - is perhaps not the important issue at hand. When we pass the Singularity it is also likely these systems will acquire the ability to *evolve* their own intelligence without human assistance. Humans could be on a lower rung of the Sentient beings ladder. This could require rewriting a lot of theological concepts.... - SnakeDoc

SnakeDoc, good stuff. - Mark Dykeman