I'm going to try to supplement my aging bioram with a record of whatever brilliant - or not - spin-offs from material in "Scientific American" that I'm able to generate. 1> The article "Eggshell Education" in the June 2016 issue dovetails nicely with some thinking I've been doing about mockingbirds. The OC went through a major decline in the Mockingbird population when the crows moved in en masse about 20 years ago. Every evening brought rivers...
See http://www.kurzweilai.net/why-evolution-may-be-intelligent-based-on-deep-learning My comment there: "I recall coming to essentially the same conclusion in the late '60's after reading Koestler's "The Act of Creation," or perhaps it was "Janus." I think it was referred to me by the Nathaniel Brandon Institute. As I recall, Koestler did not believe in junk DNA, for good reasons having to do with basic information theory. I agreed, but, in part, my agreemen...
Update 05-02-2016 One interesting note was the focus by the NASA reps on gender balance. (My estimate is that overall, of the ~60 participants, probably at least a third were women.) The large team immediately behind me that was working on an emergency person locator APP aimed at alerting first responders as to immediate emergencies was ~gender neutral, slightly less than half women. Their top coder, by universal acclaim, was a black woman. The NASA rep (this w...
As to the amazing bright spots. I cast my vote for bleach. As in sun-bleach. If you have a sublimation going on continuously for eons, then the stuff that get's kicked off is anything that can absorb a photon vs reflecting it. Hence the high albedo for the moon. The dark molecules absorbed energy until they got hit with enough to kick them into a slightly different position. This is a natural selection process that inevitably results in bright spots where the sun shines, while...
(03/28/15) I bring up below the issue of scientific religiosity and give some examples related to critically important research that is being blocked or ignored by a religious scientific orthodoxy right out of Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," sadly including Michael Shermer - the Skeptic, whose inept and misleading "Scientific American" piece on "scientific morals" does him little credit - altho it did trigger this blog entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_...
BIG NEWS!!! http://www.kurzweilai.net/feeling-virtual-objects-in-mid-air-using-ultrasound Update: December 10, 2014 Still calm on the ebola front, if only because the action is taking place off camera, as in the reported hidden epidemic in Sierra Leone. Meanwhile, yesterday at work, it suddenly occurred to me that there was indeed clear evidence that perhaps the radical feminists are more on target than I have been wont to credit. Probably subliminally refl...