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jcunha

Science Fiction Special on Nature - 2 views

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    Some interesting reads 150 years after H. G. Wells and 50 years after Star Trek.
Joris _

The seeds of disruptive innovation within the European Space Agency - 24 August 2010 > ... - 5 views

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    :p
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    haha :) well.. don't shoot me Dario. I wasn't involved in this disclosure. But now that the link is public, you might all want to consider subscribing to their feed: http://ewds.strath.ac.uk/space/Podcasts.aspx They have some nice talks there. One of them is by Ken McLeod, the science fiction writer. Is anyone else with me on the idea that we should also invite science fiction writers for science coffees? :)
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    So nice to hear Dario again! :-) But apparently UoS needs someone a bit more skilled to handle these videos...
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    Only one self-comment alla Barney ..... suit-up
nikolas smyrlakis

Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movies, 2000 and Beyond | Underwire | Wired.com - 0 views

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    some ideas for movie Fridays A "must" see on my opinion (never heard about it in the past!) : Primer Sounds ideal: "Primer is a 2004 American science fiction film about the accidental discovery of time travel. The film was written, directed and produced by Shane Carruth, a mathematician and a former engineer, and was completed on a budget of $7,000.[1] Primer is of note for its extremely low budget, experimental plot structure and complex technical dialogue, which Carruth chose not to 'dumb down' for the sake of his audience. One reviewer said that "anybody who claims [to] fully understand what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar."[2] The film collected the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2004 before securing a limited release in US cinemas, and has since gained a cult following."
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    I watched it a while ago during my studies in Belgium... The plot is quite well summarized on this diagram: http://xkcd.com/657/large/ According to the text above I'm either savant or a liar (you choose). But I watched the movie under significant exposure to Belgian beer, so this may have helped...
ESA ACT

Nano Air Vehicle Floats Like Maple Seed: Science Fiction in the News - 0 views

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    As usual, the Army does it...
jmlloren

Tiny octopus-like microorganisms named after science fiction monsters: Cthulhu - 2 views

shared by jmlloren on 05 Apr 13 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
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    Follow the link to PLoS and watch the video.
Luís F. Simões

How copyright enforcement robots killed the Hugo Awards - 1 views

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    We are living in the future when live broadcasts are being censored by AI programs in real-time. I'm sure dictators everywhere are looking forward for these technologies to mature. Having a firewall over reality is so convenient.
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    What this tells is that we should not take AI seriously until smart Luis's (or his son) managed to make something decent out of it ... "This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn't, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law. And then, it got worse. Amid more cries of dismay on Twitter, Reddit, and elsewhere, the official Worldcon Twitter announced: Chicon 7@chicon_7 We are sorry to report that #Ustream will not resume the video feed. #chicon7 #hugos #worldcon 3 Sep 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite And with that, the broadcast was officially cut off. Dumb robots, programmed to kill any broadcast containing copyrighted material, had destroyed the only live broadcast of the Hugo Awards. Sure, we could read what was happening on Twitter, or get the official winner announcement on the Hugo website, but that is hardly the same. We wanted to see our heroes and friends on that stage, and share the event with them. In the world of science fiction writing, the Hugo Awards are kind of like the Academy Awards. Careers are made; people get dressed up and give speeches; and celebrities rub shoulders with (admittedly geeky) paparazzi. You want to see and hear it if you can. But Ustream's incorrectly programmed copyright enforcement squad had destroyed our only access. It was like a Cory Doctorow story crossed with RoboCop 2, with DRM robots going crazy and shooting indiscriminately into a crowd of perfectly innocent broadcasts."
pacome delva

Landmarks: Teleportation is not Science Fiction - 0 views

  • If a practical quantum computer is ever built, he says, it will have to make use of different kinds of quantum bits, perhaps atoms for storage and photons for transmission. So teleportation would be a natural way to connect these components, he says.
santecarloni

Is Vat-Grown Meat Organic? | Science Not Fiction | Discover Magazine - 2 views

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    .... ""It will be functional, natural, designed food," Mironov said. "How do you want it to taste? You want a little bit of fat, you want pork, you want lamb? We design exactly what you want. We can design texture."" sure ....
ESA ACT

Multi-Touch Table For Factory Inspection - 0 views

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    Like a giant iPod...
ESA ACT

Inventions and Ideas from Science Fiction Books and Movies at Technovelgy.com - 0 views

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    A collection of crazy scientific ideas.
nikolas smyrlakis

When will sci-fi tech become real? Sooner than you think - CNN.com - 3 views

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    some -not so crazy- predictions
annaheffernan

Black-hole mergers cast kaleidoscope of shadows - 6 views

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    In Interstellar, the science-fiction film out this week, Matthew McConaughey stars as an astronaut contending with a supermassive black hole called Gargantua. The film's special effects have been hailed as the most realistic depiction ever made of this type of cosmic object. But astrophysicists have now gone one better - this is a really cool visualisation done by researchers in Cornell.
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    Wow, impressive! Simulating eXtreme Spacetimes (SXS) software, very quick merging process though 17ms.. Observable?
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    Mind-blowing!
Marcus Maertens

Super-Earth Discovered in (Fictional) Vulcan System - Sky & Telescope - 6 views

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    Vulcan might be a thing...
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    Only 17 light years away!!! Around the corner :)
mkisantal

Better Language Models and Their Implications - 1 views

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    Just read some of the samples of text generated with their neural networks, insane.
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    "Pérez and his friends were astonished to see the unicorn herd. These creatures could be seen from the air without having to move too much to see them - they were so close they could touch their horns. While examining these bizarre creatures the scientists discovered that the creatures also spoke some fairly regular English. Pérez stated, "We can see, for example, that they have a common 'language,' something like a dialect or dialectic."
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    Shocking. I assume that this could indeed have severe implications if it gets in the "wrong hands".
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    "Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with "quotes" from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister's spokesman." https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=37&v=XMJ8VxgUzTc "Feed it the opening line of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four - "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen" - and the system recognises the vaguely futuristic tone and the novelistic style, and continues with: "I was in my car on my way to a new job in Seattle. I put the gas in, put the key in, and then I let it run. I just imagined what the day would be like. A hundred years from now. In 2045, I was a teacher in some school in a poor part of rural China. I started with Chinese history and history of science." (https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/14/elon-musk-backed-ai-writes-convincing-news-fiction)
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    It's really lucky that it was OpenAI who made that development and Elon Musk is so worried about AI. This way at least they try to assess the whole spectrum of abilities and applications of this model before releasing the full research to the public.
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    They released a smaller model, I got it running on Sandy. It's fairly straight forward: https://github.com/openai/gpt-2
Nicholas Lan

The Future… One Hundred Years Ago - 13 views

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    one of these again. french illustrations from 1910 of life in the year 2000. some pleasingly close. a lot of flying and robots. some inexplicable (bunch of people staring at a horse). some bmi.
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    I like them again and again ....
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    what would be todays equivalents?
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    Ha! The one about the horse is that "in 100 years there will be people who've never seen a live horse in their lives" :-) Actually it's more than true now with children asking my mother who works in the school "so, do those kangaroos really exist"? Children are fed with so much realistic BS on TV (dinosaur parks etc.) that they can hardly tell the difference between fiction and reality. If you already have offspring: have they seen, say, a live cow or chicken already? (This is most probably a reference to the quote: "Horse is as everyone can see")
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    >what would be todays equivalents? Hmmm... what about technology forecasts?
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    ah. that makes sense. what about the one where they're having dinner then?
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    No idea... another one I don't get is the one with the waiter presenting some small black-white thing to the white hair guy on a chair.
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    love the clockwork orange one
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