Life, Intelligence and the Second Law of Thermodynamics
[On how life locally creates order in a universe that is only supposed to increase in entropy over time]The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy in a closed system cannot decrease, and that...
View ArticleIs the MLK quote fake? "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives..."
(or, "On not rejoicing in Osama bin Laden's death"...)The following quote spread all over the Internet in the last 24 hours:"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in...
View ArticleSpoiler alert: Code to solve GoogleNexus Challenge #4
SPOILER ALERT: Don't read this if you haven't yet given up on GoogleNexus challenge #4!It's a great puzzle, try to figure it out first.--Yesterday's GoogleNexus Challenge took you to this page which...
View ArticleOn Intel 3D chips and human 4D brains. (And flying cars.)
Intel today announced a breakthrough in making "3D chips". This is being misconstrued by many news outlets as meaning chips that are built out of 3D bricks of logic gates. Actually it's nothing of the...
View ArticleWhole-organism integrative expressome for C. elegans enables in silico study...
Thesis Defense: Whole-organism integrative expressome for C. elegans enables in silico study of developmental regulationAuthor: Luke A. D. HutchisonCo-Advisors: Prof. Isaac S. Kohane, Prof. Bonnie A....
View ArticleWhy I'm not keeping my Samsung Series 5 ChromeBook
I received my free Samsung Series 5 ChromeBook (the ChromeOS notebook given out to all Google I/O attendees) a couple of days ago, and was excited to try it out. I decided not to keep it however,...
View ArticleOn hierarchical learning and building a brain
The brain is a hierarchical learning system, and knowledge representation is inherently hierarchicalMany systems in the human brain are structured hierarchically, with feedback loops between the levels...
View ArticleThe commoditization of technology, and when to open the source
The point of open source is not to kill competition, it's to enable innovation at a higher levelI have exclusively used Free (as in freedom) and open source technologies for more than 15 years, and...
View ArticleMachine intelligence: the earthmoving equipment of the information age, and...
Everybody today is overwhelmed by informationWhat we need more than anything else today is some heavy-lifting equipment for the mountains of heavy information debris we find piling up around us every...
View ArticleKNIME -- the Swiss-army knife of data workflow
I just discovered the following Swiss-army knife for handling data workflow. I have wanted something like this to exist for years, and was getting close to starting my own project with almost identical...
View ArticleOn life, death and so-called "brain death"
Cross-posted from my reply to the following TED Conversation: "How does life/death manifest itself in the human brain? Is brain death the ultimate end stage of life?"There is something to the fact...
View ArticleStephen Wolfram, Quantified Self and LifeScope
Stephen Wolfram's recent blog post that presents a visualization of a lot of his life data is opening a lot of eyes. I submitted an app to the original Android Developer Challenge back in 2008 that...
View ArticleIntolerance: criticizing what somebody *is*, not they ideas they believe in
Somebody just asked the following question to the csail-related mailing list about the appropriateness of political slurs during public talks:On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 9:19 PM, IJ wrote:I was wondering...
View ArticleHow to legally work in the US as a student
Somebody asked me how to gain work authorization in the US as a student. I have lived here for 11 years on student (F-1) and working (H1-B) visas. Here is the quick summary I sent back about what I...
View ArticleDarwin was (half) wrong
Slashdot ran a story, "The science of handedness". I'm pretty sick of reading this sort of thoughtlessness describing evolutionary biases. If you're going to say that an adaptation gives a reproductive...
View ArticleThe Multicore Dilemma (in the big data era) is worse than you think
The arrival of the big data era almost exactly coincided with a plateau in per-core CPU speeds in 2004 and the beginning of the multicore era, and yet, the National Research Council found as recently...
View ArticleOn leaving academia, and wanting to create "Google X" without the Google part
[ tl;dr version: I'm leaving academia after many years; have big life decisions to make; need a dose of perspective. What's a good next step? What's the likelihood of success of creating some sort of...
View ArticleResults before Methods??
Why do so many journals require you to put results before methods? That's so backwards, and it is maddening to have to write a paper to conform to. You can't explain what you found before you explain...
View ArticleOn the nouveaux érudits and anti-theism
Since the rise of a few prominent and vocal atheists about five years ago, public anti-theist sentiment has increased dramatically. The nouveaux érudits are successfully introducing into the public...
View ArticleHow to change timezone settings on Gmail, Google Calendar etc.
Every time I go back and forth between the East and West coast of the US, I have to google how to change timezones on Google products, because (1) the settings are hard to find, and (2) you have to do...
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