this is sippey.typepad.com

soylent green was made of people, too

Call me a humanist luddite and beat me over the head with my liberal arts degree, but I rather enjoyed Will Davies' rebuttal Chris Anderson's The End of Theory, titled why Google can't replace theory. A lengthy snippet:

I would suggest that Anderson is extending the Chicago School project of selectively dismantling the bases for authoritative knowledge claims. Chicago economics renders social knowledge so fragile and polluted with self-interest, that it becomes impossible to produce a better model for society than that of the unimpeded market. Again, there is a sleight of hand at work here - man's epistemological condition leads not just contingently but logically to the technological solution of the market.

(snip)

For Anderson it is not the market that comes to our rescue, but the world wide web. What the market can do for material resources, the web can do for knowledge. In each case, we are relieved of the political and theoretical burden of trying to produce a good, coherent model for society, and put ourselves in the hands of an ignorant, amoral mechanism - price in the case of material resources, algorithm in the case of immaterial ones.

Davies may be overreacting...but when Anderson writes argues that "science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all," the logical retort is Sure, science may advance that way...but can society?

size matters

Short video clip comparing the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system to the sun, and the sun to neighboring stars.

rats demonstrate generosity

From nature.com, news that rats demonstrate generosity to one another:

Another strategy, called 'generalized reciprocity', is for an animal to assume that its most recent interaction with any other individual is representative of how the whole community usually behaves. In that case, an animal only has to remember its last experience. "It's a simpler mechanism and therefore more likely to be evolutionarily important," says Taborsky.

jeff hawkins and love

I picked up  The Beatles Love over the weekend, and on each listen it literally surprises me.  Leaving aside for a moment whether this is a "good" or "bad" thing, the record is an object lesson in Jeff Hawkins' memory-prediction framework as outlined in On Intelligence.  Your brain, wired for years to expect one thing, gets something else entirely, triggering the "whoa" response.

It's impossible to listen to the record as "background music" while trying to perform other tasks, because your brain keeps interrupting you with "you need to pay attention to this thing over here." While remixes aren't anything new, the deep grooves the original tracks have worn inside any Beatles fan's head makes listening to Love a very different experience.

mars

I've probably seen the animation of the MER Rover bounce across the surface of Mars two or three dozen times now. But each time it fills me with the same sense of wonder and awe... I'm starting to understand the mystical reverence that finds its way into my parents' voices when they talk about the Moon landing in 1969; amidst social chaos and an unwinnable war, there were those grainy images of Armstrong to send chills up the spine.

Tonight, Kate and I clicked through today's set of images from the Rover. She doesn't quite get the scale of the achievment, but loves the movies of the countdown, the liftoff and the landing animation. Sliding off my lap after reaching her requisite 15 minute limit for any one particular activity, she turned up to look at me and said "Daddy, I want to go to Mars."

ouch.

Erik Benson made my head hurt this morning.

Okay, if it's digital, then we're back in the "the universe is a big computer" debate. Then, I want to know how fast this computer has to be. What are the limits to its calculation power? It probably has to hold the entire state of the universe in memory at all times (it even has to hold time in memory), in order to calculate the movement of galaxies and solar systems. Is the speed of light hitting up against some calculation boundary? Is that why we haven't discovered anything that can go faster than 299,792,458 meters per second?

Erik, please. Stop it. Get back to your novel, wouldja?