sent2null space

From the moment I first read an article mentioning Google's plan to create a Chrome OS...I was puzzled. At the time Android's success was not at all assured and there were no carriers producing phones for the device but a rumored G1 was said to be in the works from Verizon. At the time my reasons were simple and pragmatic and all derived from the perspective of the possible consumers of such a device. First, I was convinced from what I saw happening in the panel space that thin TFT LCD technology was on it's way out. As an Engineer I'd been keep in eye on the developments of Organic Light Emitting Diode technology that was in my view going to be the screen technology to end them all. If not it than some variant of it, I also knew from the production processes of such panels and their amenability to running off of standard CMOS fabs that they could eventually be produced in mass at prices far lower than what is possible with TFT LCD. Also, because OLED's can be produ...

A recent article positing a theory for the origin of emotions as a system to induce cooperation got me to thinking about this subject which I've been mulling for quite some time recently in an effort to understand the requirements for building a truly stable Artificial Intelligence. A post from a few months back covers how emotion once emerged is used to tie emotional import to newly sensed memories while comparing those sensations to previously stored memories and the associated emotional triggers to them. Conditions like Kapgras syndrome highlight the unique role that deep brain regions like the hippocampus and the amygdala play in tying emotion to memory. The new study however knocks at the heart of the question, why do we have emotion in the first place? Why did it evolve? What necessity did it serve? Fundamentally, we should be able to agree that our emotional system emerged to trigger the individual as to important occurrences in the surrounding, to serve as a stimulant to a...

A random sample of the collection of improbable and mutually exclusive events that led to our emergence here on this rock. If the Sun formed in a region with less or different gas contribution the Earth would likely have an ammonia Ocean instead of a water one. If the proto planetary disk didn't have so much accreted asteroids and comets proto Earth would not have gained so much water and would likely be dry. If the Earth didn't accrete as much dust as it did, we'd have a smaller radius and likely not have a radioactive active core..the active core is what produces our magnetic field and thus protects us from the deadly solar wind of the sun. Life would not exist. If the proto Earth had not been struck by another body just before 4.4 billion years ago, the planet would not have reconstituted into the present Earth 2 + moon system. Without the gyroscopic stabilization of the moon against the distant but influential gravitational nudges of Jupiter we'd have no predictable...

I was too inculcated into the ways of religion to seriously give it thought as being *unreal* until about the age of 9. My parents (read: my mother, my father was religiously apathetic) did a good job of taking us around to various prayer services with her evangelist friend who happened to be married to a pastor. Tangentially, I found out much later that he used to physically beat her in accordance with the scriptures he preached at the pulpit, now he's suffering from severe dementia induced by Alzheimer's disease. Karma? No...just bad luck. During those times I was forced to endure 3 hour long services that consisted of grown adults and their kids sat on white sheets in hot living rooms (many times our own) with their kids forced to pay attention (some how) to the constant singing, talking or Bible reading in Haitian Creole and French. I was partially curious about the various stories I'd read and wondered if they could be real, I was an avid comic book fan from an early a...

Listen to the podcast: Accident:A view into the future of organ replacement. Mira Chu is always in a rush, she got up today filled with particular excitement as it is her first day giving the inaugural speech at the Institute of Exoplanetary Studies. Mira joined the institute 3 years ago in 2045 and had been deep in her studies of the spectral characteristics of the 50 or so Earth class planets found decades previous by the Kepler Satellite mission. She was anxious to report her findings regarding the specific bio signatures emanating from 43 of those 50 worlds. Unfortunately for Mira today, she tends to get her mind very wrapped up in her work and today was so focused on the talk that she failed tohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif heed the pick up truck making a quick turn before the light as she charged across the intersection unaware that the light was about to switch. The truck struck her with more force than one would expect given the fact it was turning. She was knocked out of...

In a recent interview, computer scientist Jaron Lanier expresses his view that the social internet has not been a benefit to human society. In particular the open software movement upon which much of it is based is for him mostly a negative for human society. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIwikI7IVYs&feature=youtu.be&a I think he is missing a critical aspect of what is enabled by the internet and in general communication technologies as they have developed in human societies (predating even homo sapiens sapiens) that aspect is the democratization of an asserted "voice" as explained below. His attack is more than just on web 2.0 , he has this view that there has been no beneficial social impact to the internet. He couldn't be more wrong, if it were not for the internet, for the hyper connected real time web of communications and the fora of discussion that are made available on the social networks that he called "packs" the following incidents of the las...

"And I am very much a skeptic in regards to technology being able to save us from killing ourselves as a species." A recent email exchange with a new friend contained the previous quote from my friend. It inspired me to finally write out what I'd been saying in bits and pieces to people on Facebook for quite some time. As for the question, will technology be our saving grace? I am still somewhat ambivalent about it myself, the current time of rapid developments in genetics and biology have me terrified and amazed. Terrified because as a software and hardware engineer I am well aware of the history of change that attended certain technological developments in both areas in the past and how those changes revolutionized human productivity in two phases. The first was the invention of the semiconductor transistor in 1947 by Shockley and Bardeen. The second was the invention of the integrated circuit and soon after photo-lithography that led to the astounding miniaturization o...