Category Archives: Science

2015 Maine Winter Hackathon and Adventure Club

Posted on May 13, 2016 | Leave a comment

This post is available here: https://medium.com/@danvk/2015-maine-winter-hackathon-and-adventure-club-2192a2699d39#.vr4wwlpuu

Leave a comment

Posted in Just for fun, Personal, Science, Tech, The Future, Uncategorized

Tagged ,

No Brain Required

Posted on April 4, 2013 | 2 comments

I was watching a PBS special on how plants, through their roots, compete with other species and sometimes support their own relatives. The narrator and some of the scientists hinted at plant cognition and asked the viewer how plants think. Observing analogous dynamics in software, it’s clear that there is no brain or thinking required.

These types of behaviors can have local (cellular) controls and do not require central planning. Coordination emerges from the cells’ common responses. All plant roots produce chemicals and these chemicals can promote or inhibit growth, trigger other chemicals, etc.

This leads me to point out another widespread misunderstanding of human behavior. A lot of what we do is conditioned or innate, and does not use the brain. Our bodies have nervous tissue throughout, and muscle stimulation originates all over the nervous system. The brain gets too much credit for the complex system of cells that in many cases are doing their own thinking in their own simplistic way.

2 Comments

Posted in Brain in a jar, Just for fun, Science

Tagged , , , ,

Video

Anticipating the Singularity

If you don’t know about the singularity, here is some background and context.

Ray Kurzweil has been prophetic.  I saw him once in a diner but I’ve never met him. I feel like I know him, though, and have benefitted so much from his published work.

However, I’m confused by this update on his new job with Google.  Maybe he is simplifying for the interview, but his focus on language seemed off target.  I also believe in Marvin Minsky’s “Society of Mind“, and see language as a small piece of the big picture.

I think the information architecture (how concepts are defined and connected) is much more important, and distinct from the language used to represent it.  In other words, the reality is distinct from the words used to describe it.  If you are a programmer, you might draw an analogy to the MVC framework, where the Model is the information architecture and the View is the language.  If you are bilingual, you feel this.

If Kurzweil and his team focus on language, I hope they do so merely as an interface.  They can look through the lens of language to build the AI, and users will use language to interact.  But language seems like just an interface to the actual interesting work to be done building the singularity.

Maybe this is what he meant.  It probably is.

Leave a comment

Posted on March 20, 2013 in Brain in a jar, Just for fun, Science, Tech, The Future

Tagged , , , , , ,

Visual overlay will be very cool

Posted on July 25, 2011 | 2 comments

I’m not making any forecasts about when this is going to happen, but visual overlay will be very cool.

We will still see the world as it is, of course.  But we will be able to add layers.  Layers can give us information like the ratings of a restaurant we see or night vision or heat vision, or little flying arrows showing the direction and speed of the wind.  Layers can also give us controls like interacting with vending machines or unlocking your car, or saving a good bottle of wine.

It will be very cool.

Things have changed since I wrote about this in 2002, but I wasn’t completely wrong: The Etherface

Wikipedia anything you see.  Add people you meet to your contact list with context.  Users generate content.  API lets developers add controls.

2 Comments

Posted in Brain in a jar, Early Stage, Just for fun, Media, Science, Stocks, Tech, The Future, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Black Holes and the Big Bang

Posted on April 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

I’ve been watching Science Channel shows about black holes lately. I know nobody knows the physics beyond the event horizon, including time and space… but doesn’t it seem like an elegant possibility would be that inside a black hole, everything collapses and explodes in a big bang that is entirely contained within the black hole. New time and space, and all the mass and energy in the black hole continue within the sphere of the event horizon. An explosion of the singularity at the center would look from the inside like a big bang, and the curvature of space time might even have edge effects that draw matter back toward the event horizon, causing the accelerating expansion we see in red shift.

It feels like the more we learn about the universe, the more we discover that we have yet to understand.

The scope of physics is so awesome.

Leave a comment

Posted in Just for fun, Personal, Science

Tagged , , , ,