tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8055987458573102232024-03-19T11:09:02.740+01:00Catastrophic forgettingMusings of a cognitive scientistT.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.comBlogger44125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-988365490022597002011-09-16T12:46:00.001+02:002012-11-22T23:35:24.760+01:00First days<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US">It was in Paris that you started dividing, again and again, harnessing the power of exponentials. It is the way of our species, and you are the heir to the highest form of life on the planet. Your mother first felt what the pregnancy tests were later to confirm, what we had wished for in many of our dreams. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-US">From this moment on we marveled over you, at our friends’ place in Washington, our eyes peering beyond a windowless room to catch a glimpse of a future with you, in New-York, as your laughter reached back at us from the steep slopes of time and met playfully with the sounds of the city. In snow-coated Paris, in proud Marseille. Daydreams and smiling absences, brushing out fears, speculating happily at coffee tables. These were the first days of your life as we lived through them. Already you had all our hearts, and we had yet to meet you..</span></div>
T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-84938814910282613142011-04-03T22:22:00.004+02:002011-04-04T15:37:14.498+02:00Letters ex Utero<m:smallfrac m:val="off"> <m:dispdef> <m:lmargin m:val="0"> <m:rmargin m:val="0"> <m:defjc m:val="centerGroup"> <m:wrapindent m:val="1440"> <m:intlim m:val="subSup"> <m:narylim m:val="undOvr"> </m:narylim></m:intlim> </m:wrapindent> </m:defjc></m:rmargin></m:lmargin></m:dispdef></m:smallfrac><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span lang="EN-US">Dear Baby, I’m just writing to check that everything’s ok, and that you’re comfortable and eat well. Can you sleep? I know it’s noisy in there and you have a lot of work to do so I guess things are not always easy. Your mother caught a cold recently and you must have felt some of the coughing, but she’s been very careful and treated it at once. This is almost over by now, and with the sunny days ahead I think a cold is unlikely to come back. We know you’re doing very well anyway because we can kind of see you with sonograms and we do lots of indirect measures and your mother’s belly has been nicely expanding. But it would be great to have direct confirmation from you when you find the time. Your birth will be the coronation of this summer, let me know if I can do anything to help.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Dear Daddy, I’m sorry I didn’t write before. At first it was mostly because I lacked a nervous system, and now it’s because I’m very busy building one. You’re right that it’s a lot of work, I mean at times I’m building more than 250 000 neurons a minute - yes that’s a quarter of a million! But please know that everything is fine here and Maman has designed a great place for me. </span></span></i><br />
<br />
<i><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">From the very early days I decided to send some of my dividing cells in a delegation, to ask if they could connect to Maman. She has agreed, and our cells merged into a neat little thing through which she’s transiting food and oxygen in just the right proportions. Apparently you people of the outside world strangely insist on eating only a few times in the day, but this is really not the way we do it in here, so we’re very proud of this gadget since it actually regulates the flow. It’s also a filter that keeps harmful things away, you know, like the virus that Mamam has caught. I did feel her cough though, and I hope she’ll get better soon. </span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Oh also before I forget, it’s always nice when you talk to me, but you should know that I can’t really distinguish the sounds from the background noise of the intestines –sorry, these are sooo loud! However I do feel some pressures when you pass your hand over Maman’s belly. </span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US">Well that is, when I’m not sleeping. It’s hard to tell without a clock or anything, but I think I’m sleeping at least one fourth of the time. This week was a tough one (although nothing like the first weeks of course). I managed to put my ears at the appropriate location, and to make some real progress with my genitals, which are nearly completed (I promise that next time you try a sono I won't be sitting on my knees, so as to let you see). I’m also beginning to warp my nervous fibers in myelin since I’m told it helps neurons to talk faster. This is quite an assignment and I gather it will take me many months. But I’m not complaining, the place is great and Maman feeds me well.</span></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="EN-US"> Talk soon !</span></span></i></div>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-11420753549330146072011-02-26T22:16:00.006+01:002011-03-06T13:48:07.063+01:00Of sentient beings and kitten pee.Sometimes a man must step back for a moment, take a deep breath, and start asking profound questions in all seriousness. This is not the time. Nevertheless...<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Why are computers not sentient yet?</i></div><br />
Computers have not been around for very long (although perhaps <a href="http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=524">longer</a> than one might think). They are now, however, ubiquitous and clearly here to stay. It has something to do with their <a href="http://royalsociety.tv/dpx_royalsociety/dpx.php?cmd=autoplay&type=solo&dpxuser=dpx_v12&pres=307">universality</a>, which is also why these things are getting more and more powerful at every instant. Given how powerful they already are, in a sense it's flattering that no machine -that we know of- has yet reached consciousness. But how long will this last? How will we know when a machine really becomes conscious? What does this word even mean? How will this new consciousness arise? And what will happen next?<br />
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The usual answers to these five questions are, in order:<br />
1. not long;<br />
2. with a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test">Turing test</a> or a variant of it;<br />
3. we don't know but we don't need to know for the Turing test;<br />
4. we have no idea;<br />
5. something big, hopefully nothing bad.<br />
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On the last two questions however, screenwriters are actually not short of ideas.<br />
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My personal all time favourite scenario would be from a movie in the late 80s, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Dreams_%28film%29">Electric Dreams</a>", where a commodore computer percolates to consciousness after being spilt some champagne on its keyboard. What happens then? I can't recall exactly but eventually the owner gets laid. Well loads of movies share this simple plot of a machine that has become or is becoming sentient. We have of course Terminator's Skynet, 2001 Space Odyssey's HAL (which by the way is IBM shifted by 1 letter..), or obviously movies like I, Robot..<br />
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As for books, it seems you simply can't be a science fiction writter if you don't have your own story. Probably the best I've read is from Dan Simmon's Hyperion, where the so-called "technocenter" has evolved from the very real and ongoing <a href="http://life.ou.edu/tierra/">Tierra Project</a> in the artificial life community. I like this scenario because we don't get to design the conscious program architecture, and it doesn't occur by accident either. Rather, consiousness arises out of evolutionary dynamics, it creeps out of the cognitive night by gradual changes and mutations, each of which is beneficial to the artificial species. But it doesn't tell us what the architecture is, or what the critical mutation was, if there was only one.<br />
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In all these cases -with the honourable exception of Electric Dreams- we notice that the birth of a conscious machine is always a threat to humanity - while in the superior Electric Dreams it is only a threat to abstinence. It turns out that this concern is shared by some people working in a field called "Friendly AI" (friendly as in "how do we make this conscious machine friendly", because No, Asimov's famous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics">three laws</a> probably won't fly).(note that abstinence might be another shared concern in the friendly AI community).<br />
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According to friendly AI, the problem is not really couched in terms of consciousness, but rather in the ability to improve one's cognitive algorithms. Essentially, the idea goes like that: the minute we create a machine that is able to learn how to improve on its own programs, the thing will grow out of control exponentially fast. Before we know, given its presumaby considerable computational resources, it would reach IQs that no human has even contemplated. This moment in our future has been called by some, rather pompously, the "Singularity". It has a leader, an <a href="http://singinst.org/">institute</a>, and generally makes many people think hard in the silicon valley, and at least one person in Australia - a <a href="http://consc.net/papers/singularity.pdf">very smart</a> and distinguished researcher on consciousness.<br />
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Can someone please tell these guys that the probem has been solved in the late 80s by a bottle of champagne and a commodore computer? Admittedly, any kind of liquid could work. In fact in my own estimates kitten pee would be sufficient for the powerful computers we have nowadays. And you even get a chance to rediscover the Welsh language. Genius? Yes.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK312YRvMXzJf3N5otEAmTGjeby7hRIZwi71Hz1wi19H5WdV-xg-aryf6HYakbs-lm775KUpwDNTbaOlugQIf12io8oCW6J2M_JW1V9cr9hk1SmTaSwzn9MgrKcC2VKGoRkE2rCmnYEtSP/s1600/welsh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiK312YRvMXzJf3N5otEAmTGjeby7hRIZwi71Hz1wi19H5WdV-xg-aryf6HYakbs-lm775KUpwDNTbaOlugQIf12io8oCW6J2M_JW1V9cr9hk1SmTaSwzn9MgrKcC2VKGoRkE2rCmnYEtSP/s320/welsh.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Studies show that kitten pee might be sufficient to make current laptops conscious, with possibly happy side effects that bear on celtic languages. Courtesy of Dr Kim.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-59680876338467699012011-02-06T00:20:00.014+01:002011-02-27T11:59:04.292+01:00Blue eyes, light and OctopusesSome remarkable facts about the eye:<br />
<br />
1. until 10 000 years ago there almost certainly was no blue-eyed person on the face of the earth.<br />
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This blows my mind a bit..Language and culture are both dated back to something like 100 000 or 50 000 years ago (See J. Diamond's excellent <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Third-Chimpanzee-Evolution-Future-Animal/dp/0060984031">book</a>). So for tens of thousands of years, all these people were doing what humans are known for doing so well, which is mostly having sex, fighting and talking (not necessarily in that order), fighting again, drinking, eating, talking again, making tools and art, playing chance games and having sex - and <i>all</i> of them had brown eyes. Mr <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-511473/All-blue-eyed-people-traced-ancestor-lived-10-000-years-ago-near-Black-Sea.html">check-this-out-chicks-I've-got-blue-eyes</a> must have had an incredible success. No doubt he was perceived as marked by the gods. But did it make him more, or less popular? Well you say, we know the genes have spread, so after all the pooh-pooh couldn't have been that bad.<br />
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Now it turns out that I have blue eyes, and so has a friend of mine. That's not uncommon, but since we have evidence that all blue-eyed people can be traced back to Mr check-this-out who lived 10 000 years ago next to the black sea, it follows that our common ancester cannot be older than him. And we're not more than 700 generations appart (to pick an upper bound). <br />
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2. The human eye (the so-called "camera eye") has evolved between 50 to 100 times independently in other species..<br />
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Combined with a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5e2c6uliTw">demonstration</a> of how it has evolved in humans, this is a wonderfully simple rebuttal of creationists' "look how complex this is, how could it have possibly evolved?" favourite sentence. Well, it evolved in small steps, that were selected because they provided small advantages, and we're nothing exceptional it happened not one but <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye">many times</a>. Another hit in the long series of demotions being forced upon the human race.<br />
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But there is still a sense in which we are exceptional. Turns out we humans, like all vertebrates, have our optic fibers wired in the <i>wrong</i> direction. Imagine you just came home, and you turn the lights on. But your light switch has its electric wires coming <i>out</i> of the switch, rather than being hidden behind the switch and running inside the wall like in any other reasonable place.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaxFZdY7RnSLQK6ymcX8GbvTFBAruej-3_TKxFHk2TVryWMYZseyDOQ664iRjlMPVtWTmSbzzz8X1W0y8TEassSRvI6I8jgRxRNxa6g_H9zNObmiGGWoelKSe6mN0WhTK0l331I7DkBqLT/s1600/switch-inside-out.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhaxFZdY7RnSLQK6ymcX8GbvTFBAruej-3_TKxFHk2TVryWMYZseyDOQ664iRjlMPVtWTmSbzzz8X1W0y8TEassSRvI6I8jgRxRNxa6g_H9zNObmiGGWoelKSe6mN0WhTK0l331I7DkBqLT/s1600/switch-inside-out.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>"Thanks for your work, yes, we will call you back. Thank you."</i></td></tr>
</tbody></table><br />
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Well the appartment is still ok, I mean the lights work, you can stil hit the switch on and off, but all these wires coming out and dangling down - it's a little bit peculiar. The guy who did this job, well you probaby won't call him back. Unless, of course you're the eccentric who did it.<br />
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As a matter of fact, let's assume even more eccentricity: for some reason let us imagine that all your light switches must be packed on the same wall with their wires dangling out, and the wires must somehow find a way to run <i>behind</i> the wall (I know, who would do that, but bear with me. Imagine you're some kind of a contemporary artist, you know, like in another room you have a painting entirely blue that you call art.). Well I guess you would have no choice: there's one place on the wall where you cannot put any light switch because you must drill a big hole there and feed in all the wires from all the light switches.<br />
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That's our <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spziX4P7FPk">blind spot</a>: at this place the human eye cannot see anything because there's no retinal cell, only optic fibers bundling and running to the cortex. So what the cortex does is that it interpolates the stimlus that was likely to be there given the surrounding. If the surrounding region was white, the blind spot is filled with white. <br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/%7Eakitaoka/moten01.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="173" src="http://www.psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/%7Eakitaoka/moten01.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><b>Blind spot demo</b>. Click on the image to make it full size. Close the left eye and fixate the cross. If you're not an octopus and if you slowly move the screen back, or forth, at some point the cow will disappear<i>.</i></td></tr>
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<br />
Octopuses did it better - their optic fibers are wired ouside-in, not inside-out-and-in-again.. These guys don't have any blind spot, in addition to being <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zuhCbNHJ2A&feature=related">awesome</a> at hiding (i would pay big money for this camo trick, but I don't think we have any real idea how they can do that).<br />
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<br />
3. Until the 19th century, nobody (who lived to tell) had ever travelled at more than 100 km/h.<br />
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For this reason, it is unclear to me why quantum mechanics should be less intuitive than special relativity (where thinking about light speed is critical). After all these are speed regimes and space scales that are both entirely alien to us - we did not evolve for them. So should they not be equally unintuitive? Yet I find it possible to grasp the <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Animated_Lorentz_Transformation.gif">Lorentz transform</a>, I mean that's not completely beyond me with some practice, but after years the <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html#data=3%7C72036f54-7e17-4435-b972-a18050d5828b%7C%7C">double slit</a> experiment still baffles me (see lecture 6).T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-60294830829184955652010-05-28T01:17:00.009+02:002011-01-08T21:36:50.915+01:00Life in AixTwo things one should know about Aix.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">1. Aix rules.</div><div style="text-align: center;">2. Transports to Aix don't.</div><br />
Let me explain : I currently live in Aix but work in Marseille, which is 30 minutes away by train. It has been brought to my attention that Marseille has several pretty cool beaches, which is entirely beyond the distractions Aix has to offer - a point that has been made to its inhabitants repeatedly. This is mostly because Aix fails to be situated on anything like a see-front, and appears to have very little intention to take action in that matter.<br />
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Recognizing this deep truth, yesterday evening after work I went swimming to the beach "du Prado" with a lab colleague. I found a semi-closed space to change and swiftly dived into our good old flat mediterranean sea, in so doing probably raising the sea level by a few molecules per square kilometers (anyone to compute this? I can't be much more than 80 liters). People of all sea fronts, you know this privileged sensation. The feel of the sea on your skin after a hard day's work, when all stress is lifted up by this primordial backwash that seems to have a private line with every single cell in your body.<br />
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The rest of the evening was spent in quite agreeable discussions on social cognition while sharing mussels in a restaurant on the promenade.<br />
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And then the true challenge inevitably came up: going back to Aix. When I got to Marseille's railway station I had missed the previous train by a good 20 minutes and the next was only 40 minutes later, that's how frequent trains to this pearl of a city are. In addition the train is an omnibus that would take us there in another 45 minutes if all went well. It was 10pm. I arrived in Aix at 11:37 but not before a homeless woman sat next to me and asked if she could play with my penis (what is wrong with you? I said no.).<br />
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But tonight I decided to repeat the operation, and went jogging with another colleague in Marseille after work. We are both post-docs in computational modelling; which makes things simple and brings deep conversations very rapidly. After scaring a few roosters in the parc du 26ème centenaire (yes that's how simple things got), we headed back to Notre Dame du Mont, where my colleague cooked us some truly wonderful dishes (see his co-blog <a href="http://freeyourfood.blogspot.com/">"free your food"</a>). We were still discussing aging processes, physics and epistemology when I figured I had to head back to the station or I'd miss the train.<br />
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Did I mention there was a strike on the line this morning and my direct train was cancelled? What you say, a strike in France? Well the strike wasn't over, and the rare trains that were not suppressed had been replaced by coaches. Of course the coach made numerous stops until it eventually reached Aix at something like 11:05pm, again after these 45 seemingly incompressible minutes of transportation, with loud music and a smell of pot coming from the back.<br />
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Of course it was tedious and slightly unnerving. But as always once you make it to Aix, all is forgiven. And if in the morning the sun comes to shine just a little bit on "Cours Mirabeau", then everything is illuminated.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small;">Aix's "Cours Mirabeau"</span></div>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-31822483269185073772010-05-22T01:44:00.026+02:002010-05-28T21:23:11.120+02:00"...to recreate life out of life"<div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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<br />
<b>The genome is now read AND write.</b><i></i></div><br />
Just a few years after decoding the human genome, Craig Venter <i>et al</i> are making history <i><b>again</b></i><i>! </i>Today Venter issued a public statement at the JCV Institute annoucing the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome...<br />
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With what appears to be a frighteningly common computer the team has designed a chromosome, assembled it using very simple chemicals and inserted it into a bacterium. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, they could eventually watch as the synthetic genome kicked out the host's original genetic material, and reboot the cell which now divides with the new genome.<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><object height="326" width="446"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"></param><param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/CraigVenter_2010P.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/CraigVenter-2010P.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=863&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life;year=2010;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;theme=evolution_s_genius;theme=medicine_without_borders;theme=tales_of_invention;theme=inspired_by_nature;theme=to_boldly_go;theme=new_on_ted_com;event=TED+in+the+Field;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="446" height="326" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talks/podcast/CraigVenter_2010P.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/CraigVenter-2010P.embed_thumbnail.jpg&vw=432&vh=240&ap=0&ti=863&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=craig_venter_unveils_synthetic_life;year=2010;theme=what_s_next_in_tech;theme=evolution_s_genius;theme=medicine_without_borders;theme=tales_of_invention;theme=inspired_by_nature;theme=to_boldly_go;theme=new_on_ted_com;event=TED+in+the+Field;"></embed></object></div>So this is the first self-replicating organism governed by a synthetic code. For those of you who care about definitions, it's not synthetic life really -it uses living material like the cell's cytoplasm etc. We're not there yet. Moreover, what is really artifical is the method used to assemble the genome, because indeed the genome itself is almost a copy-pasted version of a living organism's genome.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">Well almost, but not quite! </div><br />
And that's the best part: hidden in the genetic code of this synthetic bacterium, the team has "hand-written" three citations. One of these is the James Joyce citation of this post:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><blockquote><i><span id="main" style="visibility: visible;"><span id="search" style="visibility: visible;"><i>"To live, to err</i><wbr></wbr><i>, to fall</i>, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."</span></span></i> </blockquote></div><br />
They also wrote a list of more than 40 researcher's names and...a website address!<span style="font-size: xx-small;"> (I know, you need this website address. I do too, so stay tuned.)</span><br />
<br />
Venter simply inspires me. And he's a very active ecologist whose groundbreaking research could well be our salvation. I can only hope he becomes president someday!T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-58489759809638680142010-05-08T17:04:00.001+02:002010-05-08T17:05:40.685+02:00What's Your Volcanic Cloud Story?Here's what happened to Yours Truly.<br />
<br />
The 1st English/Spanish joint conference on cognition had barely begun in fair Granada when ...<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPY1_4Y4iCoEz_LXQK-h1oGmBPZ-IpJhSjJSXuF0UJiq2npEiHuwK1xagYEIu1Be9gjQciaN2Jvg6K5u3TZZ8S8eQShn9lxf8aeAXNXHFtClRnJR8gF1k80DOK9e1K_r1ADU4AIt1yhyphenhyphenHO/s1600/e14_23054261.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPY1_4Y4iCoEz_LXQK-h1oGmBPZ-IpJhSjJSXuF0UJiq2npEiHuwK1xagYEIu1Be9gjQciaN2Jvg6K5u3TZZ8S8eQShn9lxf8aeAXNXHFtClRnJR8gF1k80DOK9e1K_r1ADU4AIt1yhyphenhyphenHO/s320/e14_23054261.jpg" /></a></div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">...moronic volcano Eyjasomething starts coughing !<br />
(check <a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2010/04/more_from_eyjafjallajokull.html">this</a> out by the way, a moron but with style)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
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Next thing we knew the European airspace was essentially down. <br />
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250 english people suddenly all thinking the same:<br />
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<div style="text-align: left;">"huh .. I guess I'll just fly to Madrid, that still works, then it shouldn't be too difficult to get to the south of France, and from then take a train all the way up where I'll catch a ferry to mother UK"</div><br />
<div style="text-align: center;">miiiippp (buzzer sound): </div><br />
General railway strike in france -train traffic paralized (now isn't that special!). 250 english people suddenly looking...a bit embarassed. <br />
<br />
Well to make a long story short, these 250 people eventually rented several coaches and got back home after a 48h trip... I think "memorable" was the term most commonly used to describe the event.<br />
<br />
Me? Well I tried to play it cool. I thought I'd litteraly let the dust settle in Granada (nice city by the way). <br />
I said I tried. But Iberia just wouldn't let me win (ever tried to call Iberia to change a reservation? Don't. They have a nice recorded tape sending you to their website. Go to their website and they give you..their phone number) <br />
<br />
==> I had to go to Madrid.<br />
Now I must confess I only knew Madrid from its airport so I had very low expectations. Please don't throw stones. I was so wrong - Madrid rules. I loved it. Great food, very alive, surprisingly walkable. <br />
<br />
Still, I had to reach France, so ... dashed to Barcelona by high-speed train -funnily looks a bit like japanese shinkansen inside..). <br />
<br />
Barcelona..so much to say. Just try the morning croissants at <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2010/05/08/l-eyjafjoll-perturbe-a-nouveau-le-ciel-europeen_1348455_3244.html">café Ra</a> to get a bit closer to paradise.<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">Then find someone with a car who goes to Marseille the next morning at 11am, get to the checkpoint and </div><div style="text-align: center;">VOILA! </div>..<br />
<br />
..<br />
<br />
..<br />
<br />
..<br />
<br />
Except, the car got broke into during the night -2 days to fix.<br />
<br />
I'm not making this up.<br />
I looked up to the sky. <br />
It was just 11 am. <br />
<br />
Although I couldn't see it, I knew the day would be suffused in moronic ash.<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">-----------> what's your story? </div><br />
Update: oh come OOn, it's doing it <a href="http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2010/05/08/l-eyjafjoll-perturbe-a-nouveau-le-ciel-europeen_1348455_3244.html">again</a>!T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-27638335991262797342009-12-26T00:19:00.013+01:002009-12-26T00:34:37.085+01:00*no comment*<object data="http://www.todaysbigthing.com/betamax/betamax.swf?item_id=2712&fullscreen=1" height="250" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="390"> <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" /> <param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /> <param name="movie" quality="best" value="http://www.todaysbigthing.com/betamax/betamax.swf?item_id=2712&fullscreen=1" /> </object><br />
via <a href="http://www.todaysbigthing.com/">Today's Big Thing</a>.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-62804925391081056352009-12-23T00:03:00.003+01:002009-12-25T18:06:48.609+01:00Great inventions #1 -the fireplace<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;">And I don't mean fire, mind you, but literally the fireplace. And please spare me the gospel about how it was the discovery of fire that really started out technology. Fire might have started technology, but I contend fireplaces started civilization!<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> <a href="http://www.lewfrenchstone.com/images/lewfrench-fireplace7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="281" src="http://www.lewfrenchstone.com/images/lewfrench-fireplace7.jpg" width="320" /></a><br />
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Taming such a useful element and forcing it to be part of the house, just another place in one's home...that was genius. From this moment on and for centuries, the fireplace has been radiating heat and light throughout dark and cold nights in every home that deserves this name. It is only in our hopelessly sophisticated times that people --including yours truly- accept this miserable thing that is the absence of a fireplace.<br />
<br />
People all around the world, brace yourself, it is time to rebel. You lucky souls with an unused chimney, can you try and find the strength to stand up and sweep it! And fetch twigs, branches and logs! The rest of us, poor beggars, let us tear our radiators out, let us find another place where we can watch the dancing flames again, and warm our hearts at the sound of softly creaking wood!T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-43169364612665787732009-12-21T21:30:00.003+01:002009-12-21T22:30:04.510+01:00Applied cognitive scienceI'm not sure one can find <i>anything</i> more pressing than to help educate children all around the world -that is of course, once their basic health is guaranteed. We shouldn't leave this to religion, as is too often the case, and we should do it with the full knowledge our modern times have to offer. That means exploiting cognitive science.<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.brilliantstarz.com/stock/worlds_kids_smallC.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://www.brilliantstarz.com/stock/worlds_kids_smallC.jpg" /></a><br />
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In this recent <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/21/health/research/21brain.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em">NYT article</a>, get acquainted with children who directly profit from our emerging understanding of the brain. New teaching techniques apparently include several forms of playful enumeration using sensory-motor reinforcement (e.g. seven! can you touch your nose seven times?), supervised training in what we call subitization (the ability to rapidly distinguish between one, two or three objects), as well as number decisions (which is bigger, 5, 7 or 9?) set-up in a fun way.<br />
<br />
The human system for number is a fascinating thing. To give you but a simple taste of how strange it is, the evidence is that we represent numbers using a logarithmic scale -our notion of the distance between 10 and 100 being roughly the same as between 1000 and 10000. Athough I confess I haven't read the book I have no hesitation in recommanding <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Number-Sense-Mind-Creates-Mathematics/dp/0195132408">The Number Sense</a> (the writer Stanislas Dehaene is a great cognitive scientist, see for instance his page on <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene/index.html">edge</a>).T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-90819224343506879162009-12-20T19:26:00.003+01:002009-12-24T15:10:38.035+01:00The big picture!The universe could have been quite boring..<br />
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<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/17jymDn0W6U&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/17jymDn0W6U&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> <br />
<br />
fortunately it seems its weirdness will always exceed our wildest expectations.<br />
(via Backreaction)T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-89777050118640849132009-12-13T20:55:00.000+01:002009-12-13T20:55:21.525+01:00Why I shouldn't like Marseille- The city's loud and dirty (well what do you expect, it's a port)<br />
- You can spend ages trying to find a place with both an internet connection and a plug<br />
- It is full of excited youngsters dressed in cheap sportswear with the OM colours (local football club)<br />
<br />
and yet..<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi228WLoKf35Q2Jeqot1ZTma9MKm8CYLz5hTKCNxh0lCsOJZxpTNwbcCGgxYJuvkLtGlJOLNvwTh-u5vtZ4qC41rq8wSm_0nFs7n_hyeRoVuSx7F_2xfrf-Pw59GxNJT7cnr7UnbVXdO3J6/s1600-h/Photo0079.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi228WLoKf35Q2Jeqot1ZTma9MKm8CYLz5hTKCNxh0lCsOJZxpTNwbcCGgxYJuvkLtGlJOLNvwTh-u5vtZ4qC41rq8wSm_0nFs7n_hyeRoVuSx7F_2xfrf-Pw59GxNJT7cnr7UnbVXdO3J6/s400/Photo0079.jpg" /></a><br />
</div>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-62608093640475021492009-12-09T10:14:00.002+01:002009-12-17T15:26:19.829+01:00The inner languageCognitive science is a pretty large field, but three questions have been driving a lot of the research effort, almost from the start.<br />
<br />
<br />
What is language ?<br />
<br />
<br />
First notice that it is a two-faced coin, there’s external language and internal language. Everybody knows what external language is : it is that particular set of sounds and signs whose shapes and sequences convey some conventional meaning. This convention is formalized into rules, exceptions and templates, and examplified in googles of more or less beautiful instances in everyday life.<br />
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Internal language on the other hand is how the brain represents the external language environment to itself. It is the set of neural mechanisms and representations by which we humans can write and read, speak and understand speech –that is to say, by which we can in turn contribute to external language. Cognitive science is interested in internal language.<br />
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<br />
There is a longstanding disagreement among researchers concerning the mere mechanisms and representations of language. The so-called classical school holds that it’s all rules and symbols, in direct legacy of Turing’s universal machine. This school has reached a venerable age but it is alive and very influent, with prominent researchers such as Chomsky, Pinker or Fodor to give a few names, and the next generation lead by very smart people such as e.g. Marcus. In its strongest Fodorian form –admittedly not the most widespread- the classical school adheres to the principle of multiple realizability stating that brain features are utterly irrelevant to understand internal language: the brain is just a transparent implementational device.<br />
<br />
<br />
The connectionist school of thought starts from the opposite premise : the brain does set constraints on how we implement language. So this school must work within neural-like frameworks, and it studies the behaviour of devices made of numerous parallel and distributed processing units connected to one another. The knowledge of the network is embedded in its architecture and in the strength of its connections. So at bottom, connectionism holds that it’s all about associations and network states. Connectionism has been very seriously criticized all along its history, to the point of being sometimes left for dead, but it has grown stronger from every blow. This tradition has pioneers such as McClelland, Rumelhart, Hinton or Elman; and with a new generation perhaps lead by people like O’Reilly, Seidenberg, Smolensky and Plunkett. Ok, as you'd have guess, I for one am a connectionist.<br />
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There are two remaining questions I would like to describe in a another post: Is language innate? And is there a language module ?T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-67345716967220583322009-12-05T15:55:00.008+01:002009-12-15T22:40:53.099+01:00What do barnacles, toxoplasmosis and rabies have in common?<div style="text-align: center;">These are all hijacking machines.<br />
</div><br />
So instead of digging its own hole in the sand and lay down its eggs, the <a href="http://www.hku.hk/ecology/porcupine/por23/23-invertebrates.htm#index5">female sacculine barnacle</a> finds it much more fun to adhere to a green<i><b> </b></i>crab's back, slowly move on the shell's surface until it finds a joint, and then send its cells invading the body.<br />
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It develops until it reaches the underside, where it drills an opening for the male sacculine barnacle to enter. The couple of parasites then make thousands of eggs, castrating the crab in the process and rewiring it to their purpose. What if the crab is a male? Well it seems in this case the parasite secretes a substance which demulitplies the crab's estrogen level. Poor crab shortly starts digging a perfectly fine hole -except of course it is not <i>its</i> eggs it is laying. Ah, ..nature's cruelly unsensitive genius..<br />
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<br />
I you think that wasn't so cute, rabies is worse. As is well known, this lethal virus most commonly propagates through bites (98% of human infection cases come from <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies">dog bites</a>). Once in another mammal's body, the virus completely disdaigns any other organ than the brain, towards which it immediately starts migrating. This can take months, but once it's there <a href="http://health.howstuffworks.com/rabies.htm">all bets are off</a>. In a very real sense this organism knows more about the brain than any living neuroscientist. It also "knows" it can only be passed on by making the host bite as many animals as possible (or rather, those ancester rabies viruses whose dna did not program them to act accordingly did not reproduce) . So it makes the host extremely agressive, with a strong need to bite all living things arounds.<br />
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But mind you, that's not sufficient: because saliva is essential in the spreading, the virus has to make the host produce a lot of saliva. His way to do that is to migrate to the salivary glands and crazily stimulate them. The host starts producing plenty of saliva. But wait, what if the host drinks and looses this saliva? Well rabies has "thought" it all, and simply makes it impossible for the host to swallow any kind of liquid..the host finally dies paralyzed, or in the rare documented cases of remission, with severe brain damages.<br />
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Finally we come to toxoplasmosis..here's an equally impressive, although slightly more subtle virus. Lethal only if you're a rodent (or so it would seem). I highly recommend this Edge <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/sapolsky09/sapolsky09_index.html#video">video</a> to get an up-to-date, cutting edge understanding of what is going on.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-20716033009221577852009-12-04T23:44:00.003+01:002009-12-13T21:06:12.905+01:00Religion hurts more than it heals -let's get rid of it.It hurts. badly. Kills millions, scares more. It is especially hard on women all other the world, and contaminates children shamelessly from a young age. It has infected more than <a href="http://godless.biz/2008/06/14/map-of-the-worlds-religions/">3/4</a> of the world's population. I'm not talking about an organic disease, but about religion. This merciless plague is <span style="font-style: italic;">the love of god. </span>Are you religious? Please read more.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">If you're a non-practitionner, benevolent, actively helping or enlightened</span> <span style="font-weight: bold;">religious person, you might think there's nothing wrong in your faith. <br />
</span><br />
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But there is no such thing as a good religion or an enlightened religion: religion cannot be enlightened because it requires one to believe in something in the absence of light (evidence). There is no such thing as a harmless faith in god: everytime we join our hands together and pray for the intercession of a supernatural being we stone a woman to death, we support past, present and future murderous cruisades. I can run a nice, open-minded religious orphanage in France but ultimately if I teach the kids to believe in god, then I precipitate lethal weapons into the hands of other children in Palestine. <br />
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Why am I saying this? Because the idea that it is OK to believe in a supernatural being is precisely the one which drives or has driven cruisades, terrorist attacks, the public stoning of adulterous women and all kinds of violences on children. If I help propagate this idea anywhere in the world as part of my good deed I also become an accomplice in this ongoing butchery.<br />
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<span style="font-weight: bold;">What can I do?</span><br />
<br />
We must help religious people to get out of this illness. We must stop saying "I respect your faith", "I respect your religion" and so on. Would we respect someone's aids, perhaps the second most frightening spreading virus after religion? No, we would help this person in this terrible struggle, and it goes without saying, he or she would refrain from doing anything that could propagate the virus.<br />
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So the first thing to do is to point to the body count.<br />
Then, <i>secure the idea not to believe in anything without evidence</i>.<br />
Finally, realize that one can do good things without buying the god package.<br />
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Atheism should follow shortly !<br />
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UPDATE 13/12/09: now <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/goldstein09/goldstein09_index.html">that</a> is just priceless!T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-41839891153371495682009-11-26T19:47:00.003+01:002009-11-30T19:22:17.510+01:00Some standard religious misconceptions (and how to expose them)<ul><li>You can't disprove god</li>
</ul>Ah, that's an easy one, abundantly and eloquently addressed by Dawkins <i>et al</i>. To sum it up:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>Most things cannot be diproved, this doesn't make them real.</i><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div>For instance I cannot disprove toothfairies, this doesn't mean their existence is as likely as their non-existence.<br />
The likelihood for the existence of toothfairies, or any kind of supernatural entity, is equally low and can be safely neglected, given that there isn't a hint of evidence for them.<br />
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<ul><li>Big bang is evidence for god</li>
</ul> Again, I think the best answer here is Dawkins's one. Debating with a theologian who was thundering that the Genesis had made one stunning prediction: that the universe had been created -that it had a single origin in space-time- Dawkins answered something like:<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><i>"Well either it has been created or it has not. Flip a coin and call a side, </i><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>you'll be right 50% of the time"</i><br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: justify;">Being at chance level fails to be impressive.<br />
Moreover, I would like to mention that not all researchers buy the big bang theory. The endless universe alternative is <a href="http://wwwphy.princeton.edu/%7Esteinh/">alive</a> and supported by <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Turok">foremost</a> physicists.<br />
<ul><li>Fine tuning is evidence for god</li>
</ul></div><ol></ol><ul></ul>Yep, that's a hard one, I think the most difficult. It is reminiscent of creationists argument on the eye complexity. If you can't invoke the theory of evolution, it is very hard to understand how such complexity could have come into existence without a designer. But once evolution is discovered the eye makes perfect sense (just watch this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEKyqIJkuDQ">stunning video</a>, hum again by Dawkins, well he's very good at busting these arguments), In fact the eye has been invented independently by dozens of species, and frankly the human one is not so <a href="http://www.doobybrain.com/2008/02/25/the-human-eye-has-a-blind-spot/">well designed</a>..<br />
<br />
So the answer for fine tuning, here again, is very probably evolution. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_%28cosmology%29">inflationary scenario</a> seems to come with eternal inflation, which would produce tens of thousands of googles of bubble universes, each of which would have a different tuning. Other researchers have advocated a kind of <a href="http://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_%28fecund_universes%29">cosmological natural selection</a> mediated by black-holes -they would be the place where other baby universes are created.<br />
<ul><li>Religion provides moral guidance </li>
</ul><ol> Well that is, when it doesn't tell you to kill people. Plenty of things provide moral guidance. Introspection, friendship, benevolent work..The point is: </ol><ol style="text-align: center;"> <i>Why not look for a kind of moral guidance where you actually don't have to buy the</i><i> whole "belief-without-evidence" package</i> </ol><ul><li>From the theist: Quitting my religion would hurt people I love</li>
</ul>Well, if you feel like quitting, you're already sick with preaches and cult and nonsensical arguments and bigotry etc.., and you already feel bad because you participate or silently consent to all this sick business.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">So first: <i>you should stop hurting yourself and quit.<br />
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Then peacefully explain to your religious relatives and friends that you cannot keep on hurting yourself.<br />
People who really love you will understand and accept your new difference. The others..well these were relationships probably not much worth cultivating anyway.<br />
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<ul></ul><ul><li>From the atheist: not going to some religious ceremonies would hurt people I love</li>
</ul><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Idem! </i><br />
</div><ul></ul><ol></ol>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-33125231614406559122009-11-22T21:32:00.005+01:002009-11-22T23:50:42.037+01:00Beauty and designSimple idea, great <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/hotnacho/1369952540/">execution</a>.<br />
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</div>Also, breathtaking <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/visions-of-earth/visions-earth-2009">pictures</a> from National Geographic, very nice to look at while listening for instance to <a href="http://www.jiwa.fr/track/Portishead-1084/Third-121834/The-Rip-1353852.html">Portishead</a>.<br />
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(Via <a href="http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/08/our-favorite-tweets-of-the-week-jul-26-aug-1-2009/">Webdesigner depot</a>, where one can find all kinds of interesting things. Here a wonderful pencil sculpture by <a href="http://www.jennifermaestre.com/">Jennifer Maestre</a>)<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tzrnLgPO75uE2D_uqoaXiCR_PjP-KZvKY9kVlpMu5AohYBqNMw_p6OWnADC-4e44akVcn89BpA25vAbfncw28VVyYv5cRYCr30n2xSm8Ef5reINaT2CgvQY1LhWcTbk91cK_1X42oDss/s1600/15.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0tzrnLgPO75uE2D_uqoaXiCR_PjP-KZvKY9kVlpMu5AohYBqNMw_p6OWnADC-4e44akVcn89BpA25vAbfncw28VVyYv5cRYCr30n2xSm8Ef5reINaT2CgvQY1LhWcTbk91cK_1X42oDss/s320/15.jpg" /></a><br />
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Inspired by all this beauty, my wife and I went on to pull the best late brunch/tea time together EVER !<br />
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</div>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-44141976475633727002009-11-21T15:23:00.003+01:002009-11-21T17:40:02.235+01:00*painful post alert* - the Falun Gong genocideYou're peacefully enjoying your first coffee of the day close to place de la Bastille in Paris. Engaging in idle chit-chat with the waitress, anticipating a very nice and surprisingly warm WE. This is when the trumpets and drums kick in.<br />
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Shortly after, a hundred asian people in white uniforms have filled the boulevard. At first you smile, because it seems like a happy procession or something, and they smile too. Then you notice the determined looks, and the second wave comes in with signs and banners. This is not just another procession, it is a hopeful march of protest, a call for help:<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">"stop the Falun-Gong genocide"<br />
</div><div style="text-align: center;">"chinese communist party = 80 000 000 deaths"<br />
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Like many, I had heard of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong">Falun Gong</a> before (a.k.a. Falun Dafa), and they had my sympathy. Whether Falun Dafa is or is not a cult is utterly irrelevant. These people are emprisonned and tortured all over china for decades for their beliefs. <br />
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The chinese communist party is truly <b>a disgrace to the human race</b>. It has become perhaps the most violent religion ever, overtly murderous and crushing any opposition without any kind of shame. They kill people by thousands while buying the Olympic games from us, with a smile.<br />
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But I had never investigated this more deeply -and I hadn't been handed the flier. here's a (heavy) <a href="http://www.clearwisdom.net/emh/download/flyers/blue-flyer-outside%20v2_200707.pdf">pdf version</a> very much like the one I hold.<br />
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As you can see, some aspects of Falun Gong leave us with a bit of a mystical taste, but otherwise this appears to be mostly a harmless set of practical exercises for inner development, with some more or less deep spiritual theory behind. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong">Here</a> Falun Gong is described as a spiritual practice without worship or rituals, which encourages authentical thought, good-willingness and tolerance.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">But, prepare yourself for <a href="http://www.organharvestinvestigation.net/">page three</a>.<br />
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"nullius in verba", take no one's word for it, so check the veracity of their claims. But this looks to me like a pretty serious investigation. If they are right, then we should all take at least one minute to do something, now. I suggest to start <a href="http://www.falunhr.org/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=413&Itemid=91">here</a>.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-63081375956319931412009-11-21T01:17:00.002+01:002009-11-21T01:19:31.058+01:00The Scandal of Probabilities?According to the late Bertrand Russel, there is a <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_et_religion"><i>scandal</i></a> at the root of probability theory: it is the scandal of induction.<br />
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Simply stated, the problem is that what has been verified a finite number of times has no reason to be verified beyond these occasions!<br />
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Because we can only make a finite number of experiments, we can never really infer from experiment the validity of any <a href="http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9or%C3%A8me_de_Cox-Jaynes#R.C3.A9serves_de_Bertrand_Russell">statement</a>. Exit the frequentist interpretation of proability theory, which sees the probability for any event as the limit of its frequence. And other interpretations of probability would also appear <a href="http://pirsa.org/07090062/">not to make sense</a>.<br />
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Now this is slightly embarassing.<br />
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And not the least because our <i>second</i> most successful scientific theory, quantum theory (you can probably guess what <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution">the first</a> is?), tells us that our universe is fundamentally probabilistic (Feynman seems to never have fully overcome a certain reluctance for this feature of the theory, a feature he once half-jokingly called an <a href="http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/45">abomination</a>). Well but it's ok, because nobody really understands QT.<br />
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Could two scandals cancel each other? Well, some prominent scientists such as <a href="http://vimeo.com/5490979">David Deutsch</a> think that the scandal of induction is problematic for all but one interpretation of QT, namely the many-world interpretation. That's an idea worth tracking, although the many world interpretation is obviously <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation">completely crazy</a> (and thus unsurprisingly, favoured among physicists).T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-80470583308067126772009-11-14T23:34:00.010+01:002009-11-19T11:30:26.070+01:00Extirpating religionI have already compared religion to tobacco <a href="http://catastrophicforgetting.blogspot.com/2009/08/science-vs-religion-how-to-answer-many.html">elsewhere</a>, slightly varying on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_People">Marx</a>. Having been slave to both earlier in my life (not to opium or Marx, mind you), I feel entitled to comment and actually think the comparison is quite warranted.<br /><a name='more'></a><br /><br /><ul><li>They both provide tremendous mental comfort. </li></ul><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4082766-lg.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 243px; height: 182px;" src="http://gallery.photo.net/photo/4082766-lg.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>I'm not sure whether people who have never smoked realize that lighting up a cigarette everytime one gets upset, tired, annoyed, cold or lonely is just a <a href="http://no-smoking.org/jan04/01-14-04-1.html">stupendous support</a>. 5 minutes of distilled pleasure at will. (I personally remember when I quit smoking, the overwhelming feeling was: wait. something's wrong. where's all the daily pleasure gone..where do they find it? Well they don't, and I just went back to walking without <span style="visibility: visible;" id="main"><span style="visibility: visible;" id="search">crutches</span></span>)(and took 5 kilos)(and started drinking a little more ^_^).<br /><br />Well clearly religion works just the same for one's mental discomforts. I believe <a href="http://www.jstor.org/pss/1386742">stress-buffering</a> would be the correct term. Do not fear of being alone, mortal, weak, stupid or wrong -god is with you, has always been and always will be, whatever you do and wherever you go. How 's that for a reassuring thought? (What's that? You don't actually hear or see god, and feel no connection ? Try harder. There, see? This legitimate <a href="http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1016#p11829">feeling of awe you have for nature</a>, superimposed with the love you feel for your parents? Well now we will call this His Presence.)<ul><li>There is a strong social component to both<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://holtzreport.com/graphics/social_smoking.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 143px; height: 170px;" src="http://holtzreport.com/graphics/social_smoking.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></li></ul>Smokers of all nations have a very easy way to engage in a conversation (asking for a lighter, for a cigarette, an ashtrail), and a good reason to enjoy it -they share the same pleasure at the same time. This makes for a quite privilegiate form of contact which further tends to exclude non-smokers who might be disturbed by the smoke.<br /><br />Nobody will be surprised to hear that the same holds for religion. Even in its less dangerous forms, religious people develop in <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2000-03855-021">communities</a>. At the fundamendalist end, we get dangerously <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V76-4S4TNTW-1&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1093115640&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=dd53009304dfe1810abab09ce5b9c37e">well-organised clubs</a>.<ul><li>They spread and work best on gullible people (young and/or non-educated and/or less intelligent<span style="text-decoration: underline;">)</span></li></ul><br />There are well documented anti-correlations between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religiosity_and_intelligence">religiosity and intelligence,</a> and also between <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=256087">religious fervour and education</a>. Moreover it is deplorably common to see young children and their much more malleable minds enrolled into mo<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://blogs.abcnews.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/04/teen_smoking_080604_main.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 207px; height: 155px;" src="http://blogs.abcnews.com/photos/uncategorized/2008/06/04/teen_smoking_080604_main.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>re or less intrusive religious programs or teachings.<br /><br />Again, it is no big news that the impact of cigarette on teenagers is just <a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/284/6/699">massive</a> -and also <a href="http://www.globalink.org/en/youth.shtml">not uncommon</a> in younger persons. What I find interesting though, is that teens with high Emotional Quotient are less prone to <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-44JYXRV-9&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1093139499&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c5ac6e118a5b322164ad8ff1c914c351">smo</a><a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V9F-44JYXRV-9&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1093139499&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c5ac6e118a5b322164ad8ff1c914c351">king</a>.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><ul><li>Both are damaging for one's health, and for other's.</li></ul>The link between tobacco and all sorts of cancers, especially lung cancer, is <a href="http://www.google.fr/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAoQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cancer.gov%2Fcancertopics%2Fsmoking&rct=j&q=tobacco+cancer&ei=F13_Sqa-DMne-QbLoqTlCg&usg=AFQjCNGrMlk9WCswRilxGRcA1Vi4FXdjYA">established beyound doubt</a>.<br /><br />What is striking however is that religion and tobacco are both so addictive that even when aware of the harm they cause, many choose to pursue them to their very deaths. I don't think Marlboro's poor cowboy would have denied that:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://whyquit.com/whyquit/FS_MarlboroMan.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer; width: 360px; height: 270px;" src="http://whyquit.com/whyquit/FS_MarlboroMan.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />And neither would the 9/11 terrorists <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/25/74225-004-884D2BF5.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 401px; height: 450px;" src="http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/25/74225-004-884D2BF5.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-22560961297772947332009-11-14T22:49:00.005+01:002009-11-14T23:30:03.313+01:00PierrotHere's another beautiful french song. It's been out for a while, but for some reason I only stumbled upon the music video recently. It's from <a href="http://www.myspace.com/loiclantoine">Loïc Lantoine</a>, who I gather has morphed into a collective of four showmen (?!).<br /><br /><object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/pHgVSvDAyC0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/pHgVSvDAyC0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><br /><br />The song tells about friendship and how it can bring solace. In the song, Pierrot never fails to come in times of despair to offer the singer some kind of ineffable support, each time embodied in the delicate and pure guitar arpeggios that end the choruses. The clip actually makes this friend much more ambivalent and imaginary, playing with an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Au_clair_de_la_lune">old french lullaby</a>.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-57241735190078790852009-10-27T00:01:00.001+01:002009-10-27T00:03:23.423+01:00Physics Haïku (2): the lattice"your wonder<br />joins mine,<br />on nature's lattice, one line"T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-40643424864690637742009-10-26T23:55:00.003+01:002009-10-27T00:03:57.232+01:00Physics Haïku (1): cascade"proud water beads<br />laugh down two slopes<br />-foolish space, steep entropy"T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-24459877532251525032009-08-16T11:11:00.009+02:002009-11-14T23:34:29.185+01:00SCIENCE vs RELIGION: how to answer the "many scientists are believers in god" argument?Implying that science and religion are compatible. I would suggest, for a short answer:<br /><br />"Many physicians also smoke" (yes, even in <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18774670">your country</a>)<br /><br />Does it have to mean that smoking is good for health?<br />For a longer refutation, see Sam Harris's <a href="http://www.samharris.org/site/full_text/the-strange-case-of-francis-collins/">recent post</a>. See also <a href="http://www.atkinsopht.com/atk/wrldview/natural.htm">Atkins's site</a> for nice quotes!T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-805598745857310223.post-37145378985143145952009-04-23T11:08:00.009+02:002009-04-23T11:55:38.206+02:00When plants are watching...... when birds manipulate humans, and ants can estimate Pi.<br /><br />Writer <a href="http://www.kk.org/">Kevin Kelly</a> has a very interesting <a href="http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2009/04/inevitable_mind.php">post</a> on intelligence in nature.<br />I would recommend to go there for the collection of amazing facts, and the quality of the writing, but I have some reserves on the general vision of intelligence I think he's putting forward.T.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09431124962798545107noreply@blogger.com1