thedailywhat:

What The Internet is Doing to Our Brains

Ever wonder what detrimental effect the Internet may be having on your brain? The Epipheo YouTube channel animated an interview with author Nicholas Carr, who argues that constant Internet use is harming our long term memory by over-stimulating and dividing our attention and that could be threatening our very humanity. To combat this, Epipheo recommends taking some time each day to unplug from the Internet and focus on a singular task.

fromtheweirdtotheinsane:

staceythinx:

These space colony concept drawings were the result of collaboration between Princeton physicist Gerard O’Neill, the NASA Ames Research Center and Stanford University in the 1970’s. They held a series of space colony summer studies which explored the possibilities of humans living in giant orbiting spaceships. 

halo

(via thenightlymirror)

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(via fuckyeahexistentialism)

ikenbot:

Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?

The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.

In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.

He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.

To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.

As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.

The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.

Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.

ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer

The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”

We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)

If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.

Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.

Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?

Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.

ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer

If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.

If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)

If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.

If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”

To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”

If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.

To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.

crookedindifference:

Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction

What happens if you give a thousand Motorola Zoom tablet PCs to Ethiopian kids who have never even seen a printed word? Within five months, they’ll start teaching themselves English while circumventing the security on your OS to customize settings and activate disabled hardware.

The One Laptop Per Child project started as a way of delivering technology and resources to schools in countries with little or no education infrastructure, using inexpensive computers to improve traditional curricula. What the OLPC Project has realized over the last five or six years, though, is that teaching kids stuff is really not that valuable. Yes, knowing all your state capitols how to spell “neighborhood” properly and whatnot isn’t a bad thing, but memorizing facts and procedures isn’t going to inspire kids to go out and learn by teaching themselves, which is the key to a good education. Instead, OLPC is trying to figure out a way to teach kids to learn, which is what this experiment is all about.

Rather than give out laptops (they’re actually Motorola Zoom tablets plus solar chargers running custom software) to kids in schools with teachers, the OLPC Project decided to try something completely different: it delivered some boxes of tablets to two villages in Ethiopia, taped shut, with no instructions whatsoever.

They just left the boxes there, sealed up, containing one tablet for every kid in each of the villages (nearly a thousand tablets in total), pre-loaded with a custom English-language operating system and SD cards with tracking software on them to record how the tablets were used. Here’s how it went down, as related by OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte at MIT Technology Review’s EmTech conference last week:

“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”

(via myheadisweak)

wired:

If you’re looking for the beating heart of the digital age — a physical location where the scope, grandeur, and geekiness of the kingdom of bits become manifest—you could do a lot worse than Lenoir, North Carolina. This rural city of 18,000 was once rife with furniture factories. Now it’s the home of a Google data center.

(Source: Wired, via ikenbot)

(Source: , via explore-blog)

weavingserenity:

The Future of Books

A book/laptop hybrid model to demonstrate how we are sourcing information

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inothernews:

2005 [top photo]:  I count one cellphone taking a photo (lower right hand corner) during the announcement of the new Pope, Benedict.

2013:  Eight years later, just about everyone in St. Peter’s Square was shooting Pope Francis’s announcement with a phone or tablet.

(Photos: Luca Bruno [top] / Michael Sohn, AP via NBC News)

neurosciencestuff:

IBM: Computers Will See, Hear, Taste, Smell and Touch in 5 Years

Today’s PCs and smartphones can do a lot — from telling you the weather in Zimbabwe in milliseconds, to buying your morning coffee. But ask them to show you what a piece of fabric feels like, or to detect the odor of a great-smelling soup, and they’re lost.

That will change in the next five years, says IBM. Computers at that time will be much more aware of the world around them, and be able to understand it. The company’s annual “5 in 5” list, in which IBM predicts the five trends in computing that will arrive in five years’ time, reads exactly like a list of the five human senses — predicting computers with sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch.

The five senses are really all part of one grand concept: cognitive computing, which involves machines experiencing the world more like a human would. For example, a cognizant computer wouldn’t see a painting as merely a set of data points describing color, pigment and brush stroke; rather, it would truly see the object holistically as a painting, and be able to know what that means.

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thisisylove:

Go Solar! 

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Paul Krugman (via azspot)

The advance of technology is rapidly making many forms of labour manual obsolete. This is terrible for profiteers who depend upon human labourers for their capital accumulation.

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joshbyard:

MIT Researchers Modify Skeletal Muscles to Respond to Light, Key Precursor for Muscle-Powered Robots

This is the first time tough, powerful skeletal muscle has been modified to react to light. Optogenetics researchers have done it with cardiac cells, which are already primed to beat on their own — now skeletal muscle, which normally requires some outside stimulus, can contract and expand at the command of light bursts.

Harry Asada, an engineering professor at MIT, said it’s more effective and less bulky than stimulating muscle with electrodes, especially for a robotics system where light weight and mobility are key.

Optogenetics entails introducing new genes into cells that make them react to a pulse of light, usually short bursts of laser light. Asada’s team worked with myoblasts, cultures of skeletal muscle cells, to express a light-activated protein. They combined several myoblasts into long muscle fibers and exposed them to 20-millisecond pulses of blue light.

In the video below, the blue dot represents the pulses, and you can see the fibers contract in response. A targeted burst of light makes one fiber contract, while a more diffuse beam can make the whole sheet move.

What’s more, the engineered muscle is pretty tough — to test its force, the team attached strips of muscle fiber to two tiny flexible posts inside a microwell. As the fibers contract, they pul the posts together, allowing the researchers to calculate its force. This could even be used as an artificial muscle gym, flexing the fibers to keep them in top shape.

The goal is to use strips of engineered muscle fibers to build flexible, realistic robots, which may swim inside the body’s blood vessels or run across a room. “With bio-inspired designs, biology is a metaphor, and robotics is the tool to make it happen,” Asada said. “With bio-integrated designs, biology provides the materials, not just the metaphor.

(via Light-Activated Muscle Could Make Robots Move Like Real Creatures | Popular Science)

(via ikenbot)