Is a sci-fi novel by Greg Egan that I’m currently reading, and enjoying. It raises a lot of interesting questions about identity, because some of the characters are digital, functional copies of their former human selves. Are these imitations people? Sure! We see our own day-to-day identity as continuous because we imitate ourselves. Substrate is […]
A wave rolls in
Setting forth shells–
gleaming–on the wet sand.
But as the wave recedes
shells tumble away,
reclaimed by the
depths.
I’m at the beach for a week with my family, but we came a day early so that my sister could see my grandmother, Joyce. She has many guests at the beach (Emerald Isle) because she spends a lot of time down here, and one of her guests of a couple years ago was Donald […]
For the past five days or so I visited my sister in the San Francisco area. She’s an intern at a native plant nursery in Muir Woods National Monument at the moment. It’s a beautiful area, although a bit chilly. (Note to self: In the future, bring a fleece.) I volunteered at the nursery for […]
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!)
Theory research ended well a couple weeks ago. We didn’t solve the general social networks problem we had been working on, but we produced ~40 pages and two programs that have gotten us closer. For the last week and a half I’ve been translating an introductory statistics class manual from SPSS to R. I’m very […]