I Will Sell You The Mars Trilogy
I highly suggest you commit whatever time it takes to read the 1800 or so pages in the Mars series by Kim Stanley Robinson, an award winning science fiction epic published in three parts, beginning with Red Mars in 1993. Kim Stanley Robinson delivers what has rightly been called “hard science fiction.” It is a … Continue reading
The perspective of time, galaxy formation and Conway’s Game of Life.
It’s commonly known that a fresh perspective on an old topic can bring new insights. Only recently, though, have I thought about changing the perspective of time as a way to gain these insights. There seems to be an internet phenomenon these days where a piece of music is stretched over an interval much longer … Continue reading
Times are a changin’
So at the moment, there are 100,000 neurons connected to the robot through Bluetooth. It is living, it’s in an incubator at 37 degrees centigrade. We have to feed it every couple of days with minerals and nutrients. It actually excretes, we have to clear away waste products and whatnot. It is living material, living … Continue reading
World Wide Mind
Michael Chorost is a technology theorist with an unusual perspective: his body is the future. In 2001 he went completely deaf and had a computer implanted in his head to let him hear again. This transformative experience inspired his first book, Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, in which he wrote about … Continue reading
How Engineers Learn from Evolution
One of the objectives of The Ever-Blurring Divide is to show examples of a larger trend in which technologies are increasingly being modeled after aspects of nature. At the time of posting, this talk, given by Robert Full, was already several years old and the technologies demonstrated had been replaced by newer generations. Nevertheless, I … Continue reading
Biology as Computation with Stephen Emmott
If you enjoy thinking about what life is, you’ll enjoy this.
Richard Feynman and our changing understanding of the universe.
I suppose it’s obvious to say, but the thing that makes the universe so interesting is all the unknown. As our set of human knowledge broadens and becomes more intricate, the leading edges of it’s expanding border are a place of excitement. A while back, I bookmarked a youtube clip of physicist Richard Feynman … Continue reading
The spectrum of belief
Few debates rage with more fury than that which goes on between theists and atheists. Both groups seem to view each other as being at exact opposite ends of a spectrum and therefore as far from each other as any two things could be. What is often forgotten (or never thought of in the first … Continue reading
Nothing Just Is 