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Why Some Cyberpunks Love Star Trek Even Though It Sucks, When Cyberpuks Always Diss What is Lame and Useless The secret is that Star Trek, in all its generations and spinoffs, was designed to be habit-forming. Star Trek is the first virtual designer drug. Like the cousins of opium, a Star Trek episode induces a…
As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part of AI. Pamela McCorduck calls it an "odd paradox," that "practical AI successes, computational programs that actually achieved intelligent behavior, were soon assimilated into whatever application domain they were found to be useful in, and…
Carter had initially used arbitrary parameters in his perfect model to generate perfect data, but now, in order to assess his model in a realistic way, he threw those parameters out and used standard calibration techniques to match his perfect model to his perfect data. It was supposed to be a formality--he assumed…
We recognize in the concept of heat which appears here a similarity to other physical concepts. Heat is, according to our view, a substance, such as mass in mechanics. Its quantity may change or not, like money put aside in a safe or spent. The amount of money in a safe will remain unchanged so long as the safe…
We can see that there is only one substance in the universe and that man is the most perfect one. He is to the ape and the cleverest animals what Huygens's planetary clock is to one of Julien Leroy's watches. If it took more instruments, more cogs, more springs to show or tell the time, if it took Vaucanson more…
The arguments for the two substances [mind and body] have, we believe, entirely lost their validity; they are no longer compatible with ascertained science and clear thinking. The one substance, with two sets of properties, two sides, the physical and the mental—a double-faced unity—would appear to comply with all the…
A seriously maladaptive example is the practice of cannibalism in the funeral rites of a New Guinea highland tribe called the Fore. As part of complex rituals honouring their dead the Fore ate parts of the human bodies. In fact, they preferred eating pork to human flesh and so the men tended to get more of this prized…