31.10.09

Jätän nämä tähän

Korporaation haastattelussa syväjäädytysmiehet - Kryoniikasta Radio Rockissa.

Seuraava renessanssi - Jyrki Kasvi tekijänoikeuksista.
Perinteisillä tekijänoikeuksilla rahaa tekevä sisältöteollisuus on valitettavasti keskittynyt vastustamaan teknologian kehitystä sen sijaan että se olisi etsinyt uusia toimintatapoja. Mieleen tulee Tanskan muinainen kuningas Knuut II Suuri, joka antoi kantaa valtaistuimensa meren rantaan ja käski nousevaa vuorovettä pysähtymään sen sijaan että olisi opetellut uimaan.
Are Good Deeds a License to Misbehave?
"I helped my parents with chores, so I don't have to help my friends." We have a baseline sense of what society considers appropriate, moral behavior, and we have a sense of where we fit in that. If we do something that is better than our norm, we balance it out with something a bit devious: it's a zero-sum game.
How habitable is the Earth?
The point is this: we are finely tuned survival machines that have evolved to survive in a niche on one particular planet in one particular epoch. Even our own planet is unimaginably hostile to our kind of life for most of its history. And while survival outside that niche is possible with the assistance of a horrendously complex toolkit we call "civilization", we've yet to try it somewhere where we can't count on the basics (free oxygen and triple point water).
Sacked adviser criticises Brown
Prof Nutt said drug laws should not be influenced "petty party politics" -- "There's no point in having drug laws that are meaningless and arbitrary just because politicians find it useful and expedient occasionally to come down hard on drugs. That's undermining the whole purpose of the drugs laws."

My husband has a virtual girlfriend - Love Plus, koska todellisuus ei riitä.

25.10.09

Ovelat kortit


The Sneaky Card

Can Drugs Make You Love Someone You Don't? - Jos rakkaus ei nouse itsekseen, ota rakkausviagraa.
They do know, for example, why you suddenly become as excited as a schoolgirl, get butterflies in your stomach and can’t eat or sleep when you first fall in love. "Natural amphetamines are triggered in the brain and do what any natural or synthetic amphetamine does," explains Francoeur. "They give you that hyped-up feeling." So basically, you’re on speed. If you’re lucky when your brain eventually comes down, endorphins kick in. "These are the natural opiates, like serotonin" says Francoeur, "these give us the feelings of relaxation and security that come with long-term love." Combine endorphins with oxytocin, otherwise known as the "bonding" or "cuddling" hormone, and, tah-dah, you’ve got a long-term relationship.

New research shows clean smells promote moral behavior, aikaisemmin Graffiti and litter lead to more street crime - Tulevaisuuden kukille tuoksuvat ihmiset pukeutuvat kirkkaisiin kimonoihin ja asuvat puhtaissa, pastellinsävyisissä huoneissa.

Rethinking What Leads the Way: Science, or New Technology?
“It’s technology that gives rise to both modern science and the economy, and we tend to think of it in reverse — that science gives rise to technology and the economy gives rise to technology. But technology is more fundamental than either one.”

22.10.09

Muistilinkkejä

The First Augmented Human International Conference - Megève, France, April 2-4 2010.
The Third Conference on Artificial General Intelligence - Lugano, Switzerland, March 5-8 2010.

One Ultrarunning Problem, Solved for Good - Ultramaratoonarit poistattavat häiritsevät varpaankynnet.
“A lot of them look at their toenails as useless appendages, remnants of claws from evolutionary times long ago. I’ve heard them say, ‘Toenails are dead weight.’ ”
Timewarp: How your brain creates the fourth dimension
Take the peculiar case of an individual known as BW. As BW drove his car one day, the trees and buildings by the road began to speed by, as if he were driving at 300 kilometres per hour. BW eased up on the accelerator, but the cityscape continued to whizz by. Unable to cope with the speed of the world around him, BW stopped his car by the roadside. While BW perceived the world as having accelerated, in reality what had happened was that BW had slowed down. He walked and talked in slow motion: when his doctor asked him to count 60 seconds in his head, he took 280 seconds to do it. It turned out that he had a tumour in his brain's frontal cortex.
--
In one experiment, healthy volunteers learned to play a video game in which they had to steer a plane around obstacles. Once people became used to the game, the researchers modified it to insert a 0.2-second delay in the plane's response to volunteers moving the computer mouse. -- But the subjects' strangest experience occurred then the experimenters removed the delay and set the timing back to normal. Suddenly, the players were perceiving the plane to be moving before they consciously steered it with the mouse (Psychological Science, vol 12, p 532). That's uncannily similar to how people with schizophrenia describe feelings that they are somehow being controlled by another being.

Erythropoietin boosts brainpower

20.10.09

Muistilinkkejä

17.10.09

Sensaatiota asian sijaan

Alcor vastaa Larry Johnsonin sensaatiohakuisen Frozen-kirjan älyvapaisiin väitteisiin.
Mr. Johnson was caught in his own web of deceit when one of his claimed errors in the Ted Williams case was exposed as false. He was also forced to admit that he tried to profit from the death of baseball great, Ted Williams by charging visitors to his website $20 to view alleged photos of Mr. Williams' cryopreserved head.
--
The sensationalized reference to the use of a "hammer and chisel" in a cryopreservation demonstrates either Mr. Johnson's ignorance or an effort to hoodwink the public. In a surgical context, those instruments are called a "mallet and osteotome" commonly used by orthopedists for surgical procedures involving bone.

--
Johnson's statements about tissue debris, tuna, and cats are fictionalized accounts crafted for maximum tabloid shock value, as is nearly the entirety of his book.
--
As Nightline asked in the lead-in to the segment, "is this self-styled whistleblower just out to make money?" The answer is a resounding yes.
Samankaltaisia väitteitä esitti myös Sports Illustrated vuonna 2003.
Virtues Portrayed as Vices
Perhaps the most unfair aspect of the allegations against Alcor is that conscientious and well-justified procedures were perceived as wrongdoing.

* Why does Alcor remove heads? Because, according to Alcor, that allows the best possible preservation of the brain. The brain is the primary target of preservation in cryonics.

* Why doesn't Alcor just remove the brain? Because the brain would be injured in the process.

* Why does Alcor make two small holes in the skull? To properly monitor the brain.

* Why does Alcor get "cracks"? All large organs treated with chemicals to suppress ice formation develop invisible fractures during deep cooling. Alcor was the first institution anywhere to discover and monitor fracturing with a unique acoustic (sound detection) technology. Nobody would even know about this problem were it not for Alcor's extraordinary efforts to measure and document it during cryonics cases.

--
Consider if a journalist did this expose of the funeral industry: "Funeral Home Scandal: Bodies injected with poison, organs mutilated, remains stuffed into wood boxes and covered with dirt!" It's all true, right? Of course, if a disgruntled apprentice embalmer went to a sports magazine describing in graphic detail the use of a trocar during embalming of a sports celebrity, or the physical effects of cremation, he would be escorted out of the building by security.

MTV3:n uutisen sisältämiin asiavirheisiin löytyy korjauksia kryoniikkaseuran blogista.

3.10.09

Muistilinkkejä

The Singularity Summit 2009 - Tapahtumaa voi seurata mediasivulla.

Mini-FAQ on Artificial Intelligence - Michael Wilsonin vastauksia.
Cryoethics: Seeking Life After Death - Bioethics-lehdestä.
The oldest living things in the world - Valokuvia maailman vanhimmista elävistä.


2.10.09

Muistilinkkejä

"The form of opposition from fundamentalist humanists, and fundamentalist naturalists – that we should make no change to nature [or] to human beings – is directly contrary to the nature of human beings, because we are the species that goes beyond our limitations," counters Kurzweil. "And I think that's quite a destructive school of thought – you can show that hundreds of thousands of kids went blind in Africa due to the opposition to [genetically engineered] golden rice. The opposition to genetically modified organisms is just a blanket, reflexive opposition to the idea of changing nature. Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it."