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Category: Science Snippets

  • From Human Obsolescence to Technology Ebooks and Climate Models

    "… of shoes and ships and sealing wax/ of cabbages and kings.",  Lewis Carroll George Rebane (Written 31mar12; no time to write today Sunday, I'm pulling my scheduled club duty as rangemaster at the local rifle/pistol range.) On this blustery and wet Saturday morning I gathered together a few of the piles of notes I…

  • The Liberal Mind – Yes Virginia, we really are different (updated 10apr12)

    George Rebane The curious and inexplicable course of our polarized public discourse has been examined for some time in these pages, even to the extent that ‘The Liberal Mind’ is an RR category of collected posts on this issue.  To a reasonable person on the so-called Right, the reasoning processes of the so-called Left are…

  • Singularity Signposts – Telemedicine on the slow track

    George Rebane The European Space Agency is working on a medical AI called CAMDASS (Computer Assisted Medical Diagnosis and Surgery System).  It has a unique augmented reality user interface (UI) that would allow future astronauts to diagnose and treat complex medical cases when they are in space, and especially when they are at distances that…

  • Singularity Signposts – Nano Quadrotors

    George Rebane The advances in robotics, miniaturization, and control are getting scary.  RR has been tracking such developments in these pre-Singularity years.  Take a look at this video of small quadrotor helicopters.  These craft can be controlled manually or by a computer that can fly them individually or in large formations.  And then consider their…

  • A Ray of Hope or …

    George Rebane As an illustration of the public policy stasis that our collectivist brethren always wallow in, the National Space Society will announce today (14nov11) that space solar power (SSP) will be a viable, feasible, and limitless energy source within ten to twenty years.  SSP will beam energy from high orbit solar collectors to anywhere…

  • DARPA’s Alpha Dog – The Latest Generation

    George Rebane On these pages we have been following the remarkable technological advances in all-terrain walking pack robots of the Big and Little Dog programs (here).  The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is funding this program at Boston Dynamics, the development contractor.  Alpha Dog is the latest generation in this program, and shows a mule…

  • What’s Really ‘Eating the World’?

    George Rebane Web browser pioneer Marc Andreesen writes ‘Why Software is Eating the World’ in the 20aug11 WSJ.  It is a well written compendium of the commercial sectors that have grown in recent years, and promise to really grow more because of cheap and ubiquitous computing power.  Andreesen, whom I much admire, outlines how such…

  • Singularity Signposts – Cognitive Computing Milestone

    George Rebane Yesterday IBM announced the first fruits of its cognitive computing initiative.  It’s a processor chip with an architecture that mimics some of the neural net topology (how neurons hook up to other neurons) of a human brain.  The cognitive computing chip (CCC) from IBM Research shown here is not to be programmed in…

  • ‘Minority Rules’ or Why Bloggers Blog

    George Rebane Rensselaer Polytechnic researchers have discovered a dynamic network model that explains how a minority opinion can become a majority opinion when certain tipping point parameters are exceeded.  In the internet age this process has also been labeled ‘going viral’, and many of us have seen and studied its technical properties.  The RP researchers…

  • Orthogonality – Semantic and Otherwise

    George Rebane These pages see a lot of debate between commenters of widely varying ideological stripe.  One of the problems often encountered by the reader of comment threads, embedded in a posted article's comment stream, is that one debater suddenly posts a comment that somehow does not follow what went on before – it seems…

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