First days

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. 

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..

Letters ex Utero

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.

Of 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...

Why are computers not sentient yet?

Computers have not been around for very long (although perhaps longer than one might think). They are now, however, ubiquitous and clearly here to stay. It has something to do with their universality, 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?

The usual answers to these five questions are, in order:
1. not long;
2. with a Turing test or a variant of it;
3. we don't know but we don't need to know for the Turing test;
4. we have no idea;
5. something big, hopefully nothing bad.

On the last two questions however, screenwriters are actually not short of ideas.

Blue eyes, light and Octopuses

Some remarkable facts about the eye:

1. until 10 000 years ago there almost certainly was no blue-eyed person on the face of the earth.

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 book). 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 all of them had brown eyes. Mr check-this-out-chicks-I've-got-blue-eyes 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.

Life in Aix

Two things one should know about Aix.

1. Aix rules.

2. Transports to Aix don't.

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.

"...to recreate life out of life"

The genome is now read AND write.

Just a few years after decoding the human genome, Craig Venter et al are making history again! Today Venter issued a public statement at the JCV Institute annoucing the creation of a cell controlled by a synthetic genome...

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.

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.

Well almost, but not quite!

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:

"To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."

They also wrote a list of more than 40 researcher's names and...a website address! (I know, you need this website address. I do too, so stay tuned.)

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!

What's Your Volcanic Cloud Story?

Here's what happened to Yours Truly.

The 1st English/Spanish joint conference on cognition had barely begun in fair Granada when ...

...moronic volcano Eyjasomething starts coughing !
(check this out by the way,  a moron but with style)

Next thing we knew the European airspace was essentially down.

*no comment*

via Today's Big Thing.

Great inventions #1 -the fireplace

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!

 

Applied cognitive science

I'm not sure one can find anything 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.

The big picture!

The universe could have been quite boring..




fortunately it seems its weirdness will always exceed our wildest expectations.
(via Backreaction)

Why I shouldn't like Marseille

- The city's loud and dirty (well what do you expect, it's a port)
- You can spend ages trying to find a place with both an internet connection and a plug
- It is full of excited youngsters dressed in cheap sportswear with the OM colours (local football club)

and yet..

The inner language

Cognitive science is a pretty large field, but three questions have been driving a lot of the research effort, almost from the start.


What is language ?


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.

What do barnacles, toxoplasmosis and rabies have in common?

These are all hijacking machines.

So instead of digging its own hole in the sand and lay down its eggs, the female sacculine barnacle finds it much more fun to adhere to a green crab's back,  slowly move on the shell's surface until it finds a joint, and then send its cells invading the body.

Religion 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 3/4 of the world's population. I'm not talking about an organic disease, but about religion. This merciless plague is the love of god. Are you religious? Please read more.

Some standard religious misconceptions (and how to expose them)

• You can't disprove god

Ah, that's an easy one, abundantly and eloquently addressed by Dawkins et al. To sum it up:

Most things cannot be diproved, this doesn't make them real.

For instance I cannot disprove toothfairies, this doesn't mean their existence is as likely as their non-existence.
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.

Beauty and design

Simple idea, great execution.

Also, breathtaking pictures from National Geographic, very nice to look at while listening for instance to Portishead.

(Via Webdesigner depot, where one can find all kinds of interesting things. Here a wonderful pencil sculpture by Jennifer Maestre)

Inspired by all this beauty, my wife and I went on to pull the best late brunch/tea time together EVER !

*painful post alert* - the Falun Gong genocide

You'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.

The Scandal of Probabilities?

According to the late Bertrand Russel, there is a scandal at the root of probability theory: it is the scandal of induction.

Simply stated, the problem is that what has been verified a finite number of times has no reason to be verified beyond these occasions!

Extirpating religion

I have already compared religion to tobacco elsewhere, slightly varying on Marx. 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.