Quantcast
Channel: metalev
Browsing all 29 articles
Browse latest View live

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 Article



Is 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 Article

Spoiler 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 Article

On 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 Article

Whole-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 Article


Why 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 Article

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

On 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 Article

The 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 Article


Machine 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 Article


KNIME -- 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 Article

On 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 Article

Stephen 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 Article

Intolerance: 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 Article


How 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 Article

Darwin 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 Article


Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

The 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 Article

On 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 Article


Results 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 Article

On 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 Article

How 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...

View Article
Browsing all 29 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images