Pushing the impossible - Cory Doctorow

The thing is that when they say that you can't travel than fast than the speed of light, they're talking about the fundamental principles of physics: it's impossible to get beyond lightspeed, even if science fiction movies help us conceptualise it. In the same way, we can imagine building progressively better software locks for movies, music, ebooks, and software until we hit on one that even the wiliest hacker can't defeat. But, just like the physicists, the geeks who say that DRM can never reach this point are speaking about fundamental principles of information science. It's impossible to get that far.

The 'elixir of life' that could soon be given by injection - Tämäkin porukka mukana SENS-konferenssissa. (Kiitos linkistä, right bastard)

Content Aware Image Resizing - Kätevää kuvankäsittelyä.

Ending Aging

Aubrey de Greyn ja Michael Rayn kirja Ending Aging on tullut myyntiin tänään. Kaikki kirjamyynnistä saadut tulot menevät Methuselah Foundationille, joten kannattaa ostaa itselle ja lahjaksikin.

We already know what types of damage accumulate in the human body, and we are moving rapidly toward the comprehensive development of technologies to remove that damage. By demystifying aging and its postponement for the nonspecialist reader, de Grey and Rae systematically dismantle the fatalist presumption that aging will forever defeat the efforts of medical science.

Kolmas SENS-konferenssi alkaa torstaina Cambridgessa. Ja Singularity Summit 2007 lauantaina San Franciscossa.

A Precursor to Cryonic Revival - de Greyn puhe viime vuoden Alcor-konferenssista.

If SENS is something that I can go head-to-head with skeptical gerontologists about and usually win, which as you may know I have been doing lately, then we are only two steps by alternative paths from achieving the same sort of credibility for cryonics.

One Species' Genome Discovered Inside Another's

"In a way, wolbachia could be the next mitochondria," says Werren. "A hundred million years from now, everyone may have a wolbachia organelle."

Recruiting smell for the hard sell

They discovered that when "feminine scents", like vanilla, were used, sales of women's clothes doubled; as did men's clothes when scents like rose maroc were diffused. -- "Scent marketing is a great idea for the general public but if done surreptitiously it could cause discomfort or harm." There should be signs notifying that air is scented to protect vulnerable individuals, he adds. -- A spokesman from IFF revealed that the company has developed technology to scent materials from fibres to plastic, suggesting that we can expect a more aromatic future, with everything from scented exercise clothing and towels to MP3 players with a customised scent.

Cup&Up - Kylkiluihin kiinnitettävät push-up -rintaimplantit.


Laitetaan vielä tämä videopätkä.

Physicists found formula for spiderman suit

“With the idea for the adhesion now in place, there are a number of other mechanics that need addressing before the Spiderman suit can become a reality. Size-effects on the adhesion strength require further research. Moreover, man’s muscles, for example, are different to those of a gecko. We would suffer great muscle fatigue if we tried to stick to a wall for many hours. - “However now that we are this step closer, it may not be long before we are seeing people climbing up the Empire State Building with nothing but sticky shoes and gloves to support them.”

Challenges and Pitfalls of Exponential Manufacturing

A combination of Informational and Commercial options (though not necessarily combining both styles in any single organization) may turn out to be the optimal way to deliver the benefits of molecular manufacturing. To the extent that nanofactory blueprint development is similar to software development, history shows that this approach can work quite well for all concerned. Commercial software products tend to be more user-friendly, because money is invested in making what the customer wants, not what is fun for the programmers to write. As a result, even the free products of the Open Source movement cannot out-compete commercial products. At the same time, free products are available for those who cannot afford commercial software. Meanwhile, the commercial software industry benefits from the creative ideas of the independent Informational creators who do not have to conform to business plans or conventional wisdom.

Cooline - Liivi pitää kehonlämmön hallinnassa. Pistetään CoreControl samaan pakettiin.

Can ‘friendly’ AI save humans from irrelevance or extinction? - ZDNet podcast Eliezer Yudkowskyn kanssa. Muita Singularity Summitin puhujavieraita haastatellaan myöhemmin.

25 Worlds Weirdest Animals

10 things you did not know about Wikipedia

Suguru Goto soittaa robottimusiikkia telemanipulaattoripuvulla.

Otologic - Kokonaan pään sisään asennettava kuuloimplantti.

Singularity Fallacies: An essay by Extropia DaSilva Part 1 & Part 2

But, really, the similarities of these scenarios with religious memes actually INCREASES the likelihood they will one day be realised. Why? Because they are deeply-held dreams, not likely to be diminished by the cold reality of failure after failure. This is comparable to another fantasy that was laughed-off by legions of naysayers as self-evidently absurd: The dream of achieving flight, which also managed to persist no matter how many failures the pioneers had along the way.

Looking Human Extinction in the Face

The reaction of many educated adults to extinction risk discussions reminds me of the reaction kids in my Middle School health classes had to the mention of the word “penis”: adolescent giggling. If I were to get onstage in front of a random audience and start talking about existential risk when they didn’t expect it, using words like “planetary destruction”, they’d probably start giggling, at least in their minds. Obviously, we have a way to mature as a society until we can look calmly at the prospect of our own demise. By resolving to do so yourself, you can be a part of the solution instead of the problem.

Totut siihen kymmenen kerran jälkeen

Study: Fear of new foods mostly genetic

Neophobia typically kicks in at age 2 or 3, when children are newly mobile and capable of disappearing from their parents' sight within seconds. -- While most children grow out of the food fussiness by age 5, not all do. For parents of particularly picky eaters, experts encourage them not to cave in when their children throw food tantrums. -- While most people will eventually like any food — even one they initially disliked — after trying it about 10 times, more persistence may be needed when trying to convert a neophobic child.

Top 10 physically modified people - Itseään runsaasti nykytekniikoilla muokanneita ihmisiä. Neofobiasta, peilisynestesiasta tai muuten vain herkkänahkaisuudesta kärsivät voivat jättää linkin takana olevat videot katsomatta.

Useimmissa nykyisissä kehomodifikaatioissa on se vika, että muutokset ovat melko pysyviä tai hankalasti peruutettavia. Kielen halkaisua voisi olla hauska kokeilla, mutta sen tekeminen on melko vaivalloista ja jos ei sitten pidäkään siitä, kielen nitominen takaisin yhteen aiheuttaa ylimääräistä vaivaa. Ja kipu on toinen juttu. Kipukynnykseni on aika korkea, mutta tekisin modifikaationi mieluiten paikallispuudutuksessa. Modifikaatiopiireissä on usein sellainen näkemys, että kipu plus modifikaation taattu pysyvyys on jo itsessään jutun juju, mutta minulle molemmat ovat aika toisarvoisia seikkoja. Katu-uskottavuuden tai miehisyyden tai muun korostaminen sillä, että on hankkinut pysyvän, radikaalin modifikaation ilman kipulääkkeitä ei kiinnosta minua, eivätkä eroottisen nautinnon tai toisenlaisten tajunnan tilojen hakeminen modifikaatioiden kautta myöskään ole kovin korkealla listallani. Katson vain hyötyä verrattuna haittaan.

Nykyisissä isoissa modifikaatioissa on myös se tietty alkeellisesta tekniikasta johtuva karkeus, samaan tapaan kuin ensimmäisissä tietokoneissa tai ensimmäisissä Internet-sivuissa. Keho on kuin räikeä nettisivu täynnä värillisiä fontteja, midimusiikkia ja animoituja giffejä. Niistä puuttuu eleganssi. Plastiikkakirurgian puolella ollaan päästy jo melko hyvään designiin, mutta radikaalimmissa muutoksissa ammattilaiset ja tee-se-itse -miehet eivät ole vielä kohdanneet toisiaan. Meillä ei vielä ole työkaluja 2.0 -kehonmuokkaukseen. Kieltä ei voi halkaista kivuttomasti laserleikkurilla ja korjata pikaisesti ennalleen kantasoluilla. Tatuointia ei voi muokata kuin Photoshopissa, pyyhkiä ja värikorjailla uudelleen kerta toisensa perään. Puheääntään ei voi vaihtaa kuten kännykän soittoääntä. Universumi ei vielä muistuta tarpeeksi metaversumia.

Vielä asiaan liittymätön blogimerkintä, joka koskettaa toiseenkin kertaan luettuna: I am in love with a dragonslayer

Piratbionin tukitempaus: Muumeja Suomen suurlähetystön seinälle

Toinen tukitempaus: kuvataan Transformers-leffaa kännykkäkameroilla tai digikameroilla muutaman sekunnin pätkissä ja lähetetään pätkät sähköpostilla miehelle, joka leikkaa ne yhteen elokuvaksi.

The tantalising design flaws of our bodged bodies - Ihmiskehon vikoja ja mahdollisia korjauksia niihin.

Richard Dawkins: Enemies of Reason Part 1 & Part 2

Vernor Vingen Rainbow's End ilmaisena E-kirjana.

A New Generation Reinvents Philanthropy - Kiva.org, Kivafriends.org, Change.org, SixDegrees.org, DonorsChoose, DoSomething.org

Three Things to Unlearn from School sekä Two More Things to Unlearn from School, Fake explanations ja Guessing the Teacher's Password. Tai lukekaa kaikki Yudkowskyn merkinnät.

Why there is no such thing as internet addiction

People become addicted to substances or activities, but it's impossible to become addicted to a medium. You can be no more addicted to the internet than you can to language or radio waves. -- The cinema, reading books, going for walks, chatting to friends and any other enjoyable activity can be compulsive, but it doesn't make it an addiction, even if it's a daily time consuming activity and you get pissed off if you can't do it.

Ikuinen teinikapinallinen

The Death of the Grown-up - Ennen lapset ja teini-ikäiset puettiin pieniksi aikuisiksi, nykyään lapset ja aikuiset pukeutuvat teini-ikäisiksi. Se on oikein.

These are grown-ups who haven’t left childhood. Then again, why should they? As movie producer and former Universal marketing executive Kathy Jones put it, “There isn’t any clear demarcation of what’s for parents and what’s for kids. We like the same music, we dress similarly.” -- As Trilling could see, “If you set yourself to shaping a self, a life, you limit yourself to that self and that life.” And “limitation,” particularly to the perpetual adolescent, is bad.

Universumin suurin reikä on löytynyt. Jos tuntui, että 110 megaparsekin levyinen Boötes Void on iso tyhjyys, uusi reikä on kooltaan 300 megaparsekia.

Sony Develops 'Bio Battery' Generating Electricity from Sugar

Minirakettimoottorilla toimiva kyborgikäsi ja Airic's_arm.

Science as Attire

I encounter people who are quite willing to entertain the notion of dumber-than-human Artificial Intelligence, or even mildly smarter-than-human Artificial Intelligence. Introduce the notion of strongly superhuman Artificial Intelligence, and they'll suddenly decide it's "pseudoscience". It's not that they think they have a theory of intelligence which lets them calculate a theoretical upper bound on the power of an optimization process. Rather, they associate strongly superhuman AI to the literary genre of apocalyptic literature; whereas an AI running a small corporation associates to the literary genre of Wired magazine. They aren't speaking from within a model of cognition. They don't realize they need a model. They don't realize that science is about models. Their devastating critiques consist purely of comparisons to apocalyptic literature, rather than, say, known laws which prohibit such an outcome. They understand science only as a literary genre, or in-group to belong to. The attire doesn't look to them like a lab coat; this isn't the football team they're cheering for.

Scientists Induce Out-of-Body Sensation

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Prof. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, when they are thrown out of synchrony, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart. The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

Techno-Athletes Change The Definition of Natural

Suppose, for example, that in the 2008 Olympics, some athletes walk out with necks wider than their heads, and haunches like steers, and world records that normally are only broken by a tenth of a second start being broken by 20 seconds or more? Suppose these athletes pass their drug tests with flying colors, because the technologies they're employing are not drugs? Would that be a shock on the order of Sputnik, producing comparable fundamental reordering of society's priorities?

Mini-Telescope Implants May Save Vision Damaged by Eye Disease

The implantable mini-scope, developed by Saratoga, Calif.-based VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, works with the eye's cornea like a telephoto system, rendering an enlarged retinal image designed to reduce the area of diminished vision.

'Lunar Ark' Proposed in Case of Deadly Impact on Earth

But the group also advocates creating a moon-based repository of Earth's life, complete with human-staffed facilities to "preserve backups of scientific and cultural achievements and of the species important to our civilization," said ARC's Robert Shapiro, a biochemist at New York University. -- "In the event of a global catastrophe, the ARC facilities will be prepared to reintroduce lost technology, art, history, crops, livestock, and, if necessary, even human beings to the Earth," Shapiro said.

Lobes of Steel

Gage’s discovery hit the world of neurological research like a thunderclap. Since then, scientists have been finding more evidence that the human brain is not only capable of renewing itself but that exercise speeds the process. “We’ve always known that our brains control our behavior,” Gage says, “but not that our behavior could control and change the structure of our brains.”

Do You Want To Live Forever?

Colonizing Planet Earth - Kun opimme elämään Marsissa, opimme samalla iskulla elämään myös Gobin aavikolla, joten tämänkin planeetan elintila kasvaa.

If we knew how to live on Mars, we'd know how to reduce our footprint on Earth. Space colonization is the Rosetta stone for earthly sustainability because it's entirely about living in the absence of ecosystem services. The Moon, Mars and the asteroids are a great experimental laboratory that we're ignoring at our own peril.

Reasons to Focus on Cognitive Technologies
You could try to solve poverty and AIDS and environmental problems and various other diseases by applying your own intelligence, which is a worthy endeavor. Or, you could turn the human gift upon itself, fathom the power, make it burn brighter, or take on new form outside of humans and shape that form. And in this way, reach into mind design space, pull out a bigger hammer, and hit the entire set of problems at the same time.

Singularity Summit 2007 - San Franciscossa, liput $50.