Technology
Imagine you wanted to predict when sheep would chew. (Don't ask why...just imagine.) Here's how you would do it: attach speakers to the tops of sheep heads to broadcast chewing sounds. Collect chewing sounds and their times in a massive database. Feed these data into a neural net, which would recognize input (times) and output (chewing or not chewing) and eventually learn to predict when one leads to the other.
This is what neural nets do: they predict the future by quantifying the past.
A relatively simple example of this in the brain is the hippocampus. Electrical signals go in one end…
heelium |
We have studied constraints to programs, but we can use constraints to programmers instead.
Let's assume the following constraint:
Programmer must always figure out, for his specific algorithm, how much memory it is going to maximally take.
Programmer must use potentially lazy methods as much as possible, because infinite loops need more complex constraints to check (if it will always reach back this execution point; if it will always finish after getting this signal pattern; if it will always reach this point after getting this signal pattern etc.)
This is a good coding style - when I…
heelium |
Let's assume that we do not have a DoesHalt(program) function, but DoesHalt() function inside runtime of program, which is able to signal true or false. It is also able to hang.
At first, the case that DoesHalt() will stop the program when called, continue afterwards and send program no additional input, will remove some uncertainties.
At second - the case that DoesHalt() can hang, will remove the impossible task from it - to return something when there is no way to communicate it. It can be implied that for any time timespan one can say (say, 1000 seconds) there must be infinite number of…
Last weekend, Boston was taken over by the Transhumanists, for the gathering of the 2010 Humanity Plus (H+) Summit at Harvard University. The H+ Summit was two glorious days of information loading, idea sharing, and networking among scientists, techno-geeks, and futurists from all domains, all with one common goal: to enhance the human condition.
I was an H+ 'virgin', both as a speaker and an attendee. It was a smaller, more science and tech-heavy version of a TED conference—60 speakers from diverse backgrounds and occupations were given 10 minutes to share one big idea- one dose of their…
Known for their music videos that defy tradition and push the limits of imaginative filming, OK Go has a new one- "End Love", directed by Jeff Lieberman and Eric Gunther.
Here's what Jeff had to say about it:
"Eric Gunther and I directed a music video with OK Go. You've seen them on treadmills and in their backyard, but you've never seen them like this. With some fancy cameras and a little magic, we figured out how to dance with time. For those of you who like numbers...
The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x…
Hank |
Can't make it to the H+ Summit because you're in South Africa for the World Cup? The folks at the H+ "Rise of the Citizen-Scientist" summit have it covered.
Take Scientific Blogging Featured Author Andrea Kuszewski's enhancing intelligence survey here: Instructions for the Intelligence Enhancement Study
Slide presentations are here: http://www.slideshare.net/humanityplus
Live streaming of the talks is also here:
Watch live streaming video from humanityplus at livestream.com
The 2010 World Cup will be watched online by nearly a third of British football fans, according to a survey released today by PC World. They questioned over 3,000 Brits in the run up to the World Cup following a surge in sales of its wireless networking and video streaming gadgets.
What did they find?
30% of fans, which equates to over 14 million of those expected to watch the World Cup live, are planning on doing so over the Internet.
Nearly a quarter (23%) revealed they would be using laptops or desktop PCs.
One in ten (10%) expect to follow the action using a smart phone such as a…
Players, most loudly in Brazil, are not happy with the Jabulani ball in use for World Cup 2010 and have made no secret about it recently - despite it being in use for months. There hasn't been this much controversy over a World Cup ball since ... well ... the last World Cup, when the ball was called too smooth.
So will things get even weirder since the 2010 ball has new ridges and grooves? They sure will, say physics experts at the University of Adelaide who believe the new Jabulani ball will play "harder and faster", bending even more unpredictably than its…
AT&T has announced that they will end their unlimited mobile data plan next week. It doesn’t sound like the result will be bad, though: the outgoing unlimited plan is $30 per month. The new plans are $15 per month for 200 megabytes, and $25 per month for 2 gigabytes — both with reasonably priced options to add more if you exceed the limit.
This all comes with some meaningless estimates about what you might be able to do with that much data:
The lowest-priced data option is called DataPlus and will cost $15 a month. It gives mobile phone subscribers access to 200 megabytes of data each…
calliope |
Just a quickie today, I may be working to turn the ionosphere into the world's biggest musical instrument, but a fellow named Tristan has done a music hack that makes any song swing.
The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect.
Great samples on the page-- Sweet Child o' Mine as swing? I have got to get to Music Hack Day sometime.
Remember, as Prof. Schickle says, "It don't mean a thing if it ain't…