29 JAN 2015 by ideonexus
Loss of Hope Accelerates the Death of Trantor
"The fall of Trantor," said Seldon, "cannot be stopped by any conceivable
effort. It can be hastened easily, however. The tale of my interrupted
trial will spread through the Galaxy. Frustration of my plans to lighten
the disaster will convince people that the future holds no promise to them.
Already they recall the lives of their grandfathers with envy. They will
see that political revolutions and trade stagnations will increase. The
feeling will pervade the Galaxy that onl... 1 
notes
notes13 MAY 2013 by ideonexus
AI Fails Because it Uses the Wrong Kinds of Computers
My own opinion is that AI has failed to fulfill its promise because we are using the wrong kind of computers. We are using digital computers, and the human brain is probably analog rather than digital. So my guess is that AI will succeed only after we move from digital to analog computing. This is a tough intellectual problem that cannot be solved just by spending a lot of money. 
1 Human brains are analog, computers are digital.
08 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
The Problem with Paradigms
The success of the paradigm... is at the start largely a promise of success ... Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise... Mopping up operations are what engage most scientists throughout their careers. They constitute what I am here calling normal science... That enterprise seems an attempt to force nature into the preformed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies. No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed those... 1 notes
notesIs that scientists tend to try and keep nature in the box, ignoring phenomena that fall outside the paradigm.
08 SEP 2011 by ideonexus
The Miracle of Man is How Far He Has Risen
The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature... 1 notes
notesHow can people say that evolution detracts from Human excellence, when it demonstrates our magnificence so succinctly?
09 JUN 2011 by ideonexus
The Promise of GM Foods
TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO, humans learned how to farm. It was an epochal invention that made possible settled life, cities, craft specialization, writing, organized religion, architecture, mathematics. science. Now humanity stands on the brink of a second agricultural revolution potentially as great as the one that occurred when our ancestors gave up hunter-gatherer way of life and settled down as farmers. Scientists and engineers are poised to genetically modify organisms to increase the yield,... 1 notes
notesGM foods hold the possibility of a second green revolution, allowing us to use less pesticides and less fertilizer and improve the nutritional value of our food supply.
13 MAR 2011 by ideonexus
Money is Fiction
Ira Glass: For money, afterall, long ago, we used to use gold, and if you wanted to buy something, you had to carry around these heavy, shiny pieces of metal. Then we decided, no, let's just leave the gold in a bank. Instead of the gold, we're going to carry around these pieces of paper, and the paper on them says, "Yes, there's gold. You can take this paper money to a bank, you can swap it for gold." Maybe you've seen old dollars that say on them "Promise to pay the bearer so many dollars in...
1 Today there is not gold backing money, nor even bills for much of the money possessed by the people of the United States. It's just and idea we agree upon.
23 JAN 2011 by ideonexus
Reading Comments on the Internet Feels Like It's the End ...
Watching an unbelievably beautiful video of Hubble probing the edge of space: unfathomable 17.000 comments, but half of them inane, gross, with atrocious spelling, insults from childish name-calling, immature outbursts, vicious moronic bullying to outright gibberish insanity. Reading YouTube comment threads can make you sense the end of the world as we knew it.
How sad, but I guess one doesn’t have to look?
...
The Internet brings the promise of connecting it all.
But it could also connect... 1 notes
notesA shared sentiment, the idea that reading youtube comments robs our faith in humanity.
