1966/1965 Novel: Dune by Frank Herbert
1970/1969 Novel: The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
1971/1970 Novel: Ringworld by Larry Niven
1973/1972 Novel: The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov
1974/1973 Novel: Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
1975/1974 Novel: The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin
1976/1975 Novel: The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
1978/1977 Novel: Gateway by […]
“…grad students exist not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.” –Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon
…and that is why I want to be a professor!
Movies to see:
Antonia’s Line
Straw Dogs
The Man Without a Face
Infinity
…and some math-related fiction:
http://math.cofc.edu/kasman/MATHFICT/
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5791/1304
212 copies in humans, 37 in chimps, 30 in macaques, 1 in rodents…proportional to size of neocortex?
I don’t know why the last post got cut off…maybe I’ll finish it one of these days. Pretty busy with grad school apps, two senior projects, classes, and frisbee, though. (Not to mention robotics, NEO, and the mental energy […]
I believe that the theory of intelligence that Jeff Hawkins introduces in this book is largely correct. I’m not entirely convinced by some of his anecdotes (especially the 100-neuron rule), but it may be that I could be, were the examples more developed.
I do think that the mind is all about pattern recognition. It makes […]
A very interesting online book about how rapid advances in robotics will utterly change the way the world works in the next fifty years. I think Marshall Brain is entirely correct. Although, for now, Janara and I think we should focus on making a robot that collects tennis balls. (Seriously–it’s a brilliant idea!)
Can we say, “I feel nauseous.”? I’ve gone both ways on this issue, and therefore I generally avoid it. It seems that experts are on my side.
CNN Money ran an article a while ago on four possible paths Google may take. Personally, I like the last one, inspired by Ray Kurzweil, where Google becomes God. They both begin with “Go”…coincidence?
Recently, I’ve been reading a bit more than usual. Two days ago I finished Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream. It was billed as a romance novel, which I only roughly agree with; was one of two of his novels to be made into a movie, and was published posthumously. It was pretty good, but a […]
I have a comical quibble with Quine’s thesis:
He developed his theory based on a finite number of observations of theories. Thus, while his theory could be the correct function, it is not necessarily so. We clearly must create more theories to further test Quine’s theory of the underdetermination of theories.