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Scientific and speculative articles about the future of human evolution regarding to artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, transhumanism, nanotechnology, space colonization, time travel, life extension and human enhancement

First, a great website for random ideas. Secondly, who wants to contend this idea?

This is really cool. I know one of the authors and he is a good guy... the only thing that leaves me unsatisfied is that if the whole issue is related to thermal effects one should have seen the Pioneer effect all the time and not only at about 10 AU... ...or is there some thermal process that kicked in only at this distance?

Here's an update on this theory: NASA Releases New Pioneer Anomaly Analysis "The mysterious force acting on the Pioneer spacecraft seems to be falling exponentially. That's a strong clue that on-board heat is to blame, says NASA." Heat emission 'most likely cause' of pioneer anomaly "What's more interesting is that, contrary to the original analysis conducted all those years ago, the deceleration does seem to be decelerating at an exponential rate -- just as one might expect from the radioactive decay of plutonium-238, which powers the two spacecraft. Turyshev concludes, "The most likely cause of the Pioneer anomaly is the anisotropic emission of on-board heat.""

unfortunately the original article is subscription only "Among the evidence the article cites for this conclusion is Google's recent hiring of Brian Holtz and Dave Bettinger. Both came from companies (O3b and VT iDirect respectively) that specialize in communication satellites. Google has also invested in O3b and a current Google employee sits on company's board. A Boeing representative told The Information that Facebook and Google are "beginning to show a broader interest in satellite technology." While both companies are looking to space to broaden their reach, the ad-supported Google has the potential resources (cash) and gumption to actually follow through in the immediate future."

Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life. The simulation results made me think of Jojo's attempts to make a self-assembling space structure. Seems he may have been on the right track, just not thinking big enough

:-P Thanks Thijs... I do not agree with the premise of the article that a possible correlation of energy dissipation in living systems and their fitness means that one is the cause for the other - it may just be that both go hand-in-hand because of the nature of the world that we live in. Maybe there is such a drive for pre-biotic systems (like crystals and amino acids), but once life as we know it exists (i.e., heredity + mutation) it is hard to see the need for an amendment of Darwin's principles. The following just misses the essence of Darwin: "If England's approach stands up to more testing, it could further liberate biologists from seeking a Darwinian explanation for every adaptation and allow them to think more generally in terms of dissipation-driven organization. They might find, for example, that "the reason that an organism shows characteristic X rather than Y may not be because X is more fit than Y, but because physical constraints make it easier for X to evolve than for Y to evolve." Darwin's principle in its simplest expression just says that if a genome is more effective at reproducing it is more likely to dominate the next generation. The beauty of it is that there is NO need for a steering mechanism (like maximize energy dissipation) any random set of mutations will still lead to an increase of reproductive effectiveness. BTW: what does "better at dissipating energy" even mean? If I run around all the time I will have more babies? Most species that prove to be very successful end up being very good at conserving energy: trees, turtles, worms. Even complexity of an organism is not a recipe for evolutionary success: jellyfish have been successful for hundreds of millions of years while polar bears are seem to be on the way out.

Other possible study: get a textbook example of an image of a pen, evolve it just enough so NN can't recognize it anymore, while minimizing the distance between the original and evolved images. EDIT: Its been done already: http://cs.nyu.edu/~zaremba/docs/understanding.pdf

Of course, you can't really use them to extrapolate. The unknown unknown is always the trickiest :P They should just make another class "random bullshit", really and dump all of this stuff in there. I think there's a potential paper right there

NASA validates the EmDrive (http://emdrive.com/) technology for converting electrical energy into thrust. (from the website: "Thrust is produced by the amplification of the radiation pressure of an electromagnetic wave propagated through a resonant waveguide assembly.")

I have to join the skeptics on this one ...

"The irony is that a personality disposition normally seen as antisocial - disagreeableness - may actually be linked to 'pro-social' behavior ..."

anybody has access to the pdf of the original article? http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopy.12104/abstract

have it ....

Although it may seem like the above two experiments violate the uncertainty principle because the results show a smaller-than-required degree of uncertainty, Shih and his coauthors explain that no violation has occurred due to the fact that the experiments involve photon pairs rather than individual photons. The scientists argue that Popper's original thought experiment was based on a misunderstanding of the proper context of the uncertainty principle: it governs the behavior of single particles only, not the "correlation" of two particles.

TensorFlow is an open source software library for numerical computation using data flow graphs. Nodes in the graph represent mathematical operations, while the graph edges represent the multidimensional data arrays (tensors) communicated between them. The flexible architecture allows you to deploy computation to one or more CPUs or GPUs in a desktop, server, or mobile device with a single API. TensorFlow was originally developed by researchers and engineers working on the Google Brain Team within Google's Machine Intelligence research organization for the purposes of conducting machine learning and deep neural networks research, but the system is general enough to be applicable in a wide variety of other domains as well.

And the interface even looks a bit less retarded than theano

Travel back in time and play with the original Windows 3.11. back when using a computer still meant loading EMM386 in your config.sys ;) Remember that expensive big box of hardware you were so proud of? Now the whole thing is simulated in your browser. Using JavaScript. And still runs faster. This is a collection of curated Windows 3.x software, meant to show the range of software products available for the 3.x Operating System in the early 1990s.

Awesome :) It's even got skifree!

I wonder if this could be used for irregular adaptive grids? From the description: "One application of the diagram is the idea of Voronoi entropy - a mathematical tool for quantitative characterisation of the orderliness of points distributed on a surface - i.e. how visually 'ordered' the tessellation is. I found this idea particularly fascinating especially when thinking about the aperiodicity and the infinite structure of the Penrose tiling. In these visuals, the Voronoi diagram is created using the vertices of the Penrose as its seed points. This creates a new type of Penrose Tiling, clearly different from the classical Penrose, however still exhibiting the fivefold structure of the original, while 'defects' begin to appear at the peripheries."