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LeopoldS

Human Brain Project - Goals - 3 views

www.humanbrainproject.eu/goals.html

AI bio technology science

shared by LeopoldS on 20 May 11 - No Cached
  • LeopoldS on 20 May 11
     
    can we contribute in any way to this - or alternatively benefit from this research already now?
  • ...4 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Watch out!! I read quite a lot about the contribution by EPFL (apparently coordinator) and their boss, Henry Markram. From what I read, this is not really science, but mainly a PR campaign. The main motor in this project is attracting a lot of money and the main aim to do so is promising a lot of stuff that nobody will be able to deliver. Accordingly, Markram is a very controversial person in the business...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 20 May 11
     
    Oups, sorry! Of course I meant, "the main MEAN to do so...", but the aim justifies the means. Well, that's exactly Markram's motto, I guess.
  • LeopoldS on 21 May 11
     
    interesting info indeed ... I though still think that the overall goal of this project, even if too ambitious for the time being is interesting, no?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    It's not about interesting or not, it's about serious science or not. Also the goal of a fortune-teller is interesting, isn't it? Any description of a good science project is too ambitious, that's normal and not necessarily PR. But personally I think there is a certain limit where a science project becomes a bad SciFi thriller. This one here is a dime novel, I think. But the too ambitious is not the only point I became very doubtful. I have seen quite a number of scientists and engineers from different fields; what I read about the character and attitude of this guy just hints towards the worst case scenario. It's presumptive evidence, I know...
  • LeopoldS on 22 May 11
     
    that bad! wow ....
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 May 11
     
    You know me, I'm the bullshitter... You remember Kurzweil and his Singularity-nonsense. In a way this was very similar. Though I think Kurzweil and Markram are very different characters (The Singularity essentially is a religion, I can't see anything like that in Markram's claims) they seem to share an important point: they are both complete nerds that apparently never spent a single thought on the limits of science (in its English meaning) in general nor of their particular research field in specific. One may find this excusable, I don't. But even then, they make claims that the nerdest nerd must know that they are completely unrealistic and thus I just have to assume that they claim their nonsense on purpose. The reason in Markram's case clearly seems to be money. But all this does not mean that these nerds cannot produce valuable results.
ESA ACT

Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything? - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...mg19626303.900

PHY crackpot

shared by ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09 - Cached
  • ESA ACT on 24 Apr 09
     
    Widely believed to be nonsense among serious theorists.
santecarloni

The Higgs, Boltzmann Brains, and Monkeys Typing Hamlet | The Crux | Discover Magazine - 7 views

blogs.discovermagazine.com/...ains-and-monkeys-typing-hamlet

science space

shared by santecarloni on 01 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • santecarloni on 01 Nov 12
     
    good luck with this....
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 01 Nov 12
     
    Nice article, actually! It summarizes in "human readable format" why and how too many cosmologists and string theorists just went bozo...
  • pacome delva on 13 Nov 12
     
    really ! this article should go for the ignobels ! http://arxiv.org/abs/0808.3778 I wonder which substance theorists are taking... I will avoid...! but really this is very preoccupating: "complex structures will occasionally emerge from the vacuum as quantum fluctuations, at a small but nonzero rate per unit spacetime volume. An intelligent observer, like a human, could be one such structure." Is this a new alternative to Darwinism...??? a support to creationism ?? How can a physicist can write such non-sense ?
  • pacome delva on 13 Nov 12
     
    and this is published in PRD !!!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 13 Nov 12
     
    In 1996 Sokal hoaxed sociologists with his famous nonsense text on political implications of quantum gravity. Can one play a similar game with "researchers" on Boltzmann brains, multiverses, string landscapes or similar? I doubt, this is just reality satire that can't be topped.
  • LeopoldS on 13 Nov 12
     
    Poor Boltzmann ...
Alexander Wittig

All Prior Art - 1 views

allpriorart.com

art law fun

shared by Alexander Wittig on 12 Apr 16 - No Cached
jcunha liked it
  • Alexander Wittig on 12 Apr 16
     
    All Prior Art is a project attempting to algorithmically create and publicly publish all possible new prior art, thereby making the published concepts not patent-able. The concept is to democratize ideas, provide an impetus for change in the antiquated patent system, and to preempt patent trolls. The system works by pulling text from the entire database of US issued and published (un-approved) patents and creating prior art from the patent language. While most inventions generated will be nonsensical, the cost to computationally create and publish millions of ideas is nearly zero - which allows for a higher probability of possible valid prior art.
Thijs Versloot

Does your iPhone have free will? #arXiv - 3 views

medium.com/...1e223b77e60

technology behavior

shared by Thijs Versloot on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Thijs Versloot on 22 Oct 13
     
    If you've ever found your iPhone taking control of your life, there may be a good reason. It may think it has free will. That may not be quite as far-fetched as it sounds. Today, one leading scientist outlines a 'Turing Test' for free will and says that while simple devices such as thermostats cannot pass, more complex ones like iPhones might.
  • ...3 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 Oct 13
     
    An interesting paper about how you should *NOT* think about free will...
  • johannessimon81 on 23 Oct 13
     
    I must say that the fact that the outcome of a thought process is not evident to myself in advance sounds like a more plausible explanation than 'free will' being the product of quantum mechanics. The later would not only produce unpredictable decisions but probably also irrational ones...
  • Paul N on 24 Oct 13
     
    Even if it were the product of quantum mechanics, it's still the result of external interference and not the result of 'free' will. It doesn't matter if the external input is deterministic or random, it's still external and it's not "YOU" that decided stuff.
  • Luzi Bergamin on 24 Oct 13
     
    I don't know the inventor of that nonsense that the free will should be the result of QM. It's about the only point I agree with the author of the paper: QM is not necessary and doesn't help. What I meant: all these thought experiments done by typical ultra-naive realists (or ultra-naive physicalists, if you prefer) that cultivate the university departments of physics, computer science etc. are put the cart before the horse. First one has to clarify the role of physical theories and its concepts (e.g. causality) and then one can start to ask how "free will" could perhaps be seen in these theories. More than 200 years ago there existed a famous philosopher named Kant who had some interesting thoughts about this. But authors like Lloyd behave as if he never existed, in fact is view of the world is even pre-Platonic!
  • LeopoldS on 27 Oct 13
     
    Henry Kissinger How I'm missing yer And wishing you were here
duncan barker

Challenging Existence of 'Absolute Time' - 3 views

www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/...time.html

phy

shared by duncan barker on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 12 Aug 10
     
    I doubt that Shnoll is really the first one making such experiments, but perhaps they are more complete than any others done before. Similar things are very popular in the context of Psychology and more exotic fields. If I remember correctly someone ran long experiments with random number generators... Mostly the stories died after a short time, since the experiments are not reproducable. Anyway, why do these guys always have to claim that their work is somehow fundamentally changing our view of physics, notoriously referring to Einstein-Bohr debates and this stuff. That's nonsense! If these effects exist the first explanation is always much simpler. There is somewhere something that influences physics on Earth in a defined way. But this influence depends on the relative position or whatever of the Earth to that whatever-it-is. No problem with absolute time and all that sh...
  • LeopoldS on 12 Aug 10
     
    Two years ago, nearly unnoticed in the West, the Russian biophysicist S.E. Shnoll published a paper in the prominent Russian physics journal Uspekhi Fisicheskikh Nauk ..... ah then ...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 12 Aug 10
     
    You are right, Leo, they are mostly Russians that publish in some unspellable Journals nobody knows.... or then they are supported by Templeton Foundation.
LeopoldS

Short-term meditation induces white matter changes in the anterior cingulate - PNAS - 3 views

www.pnas.org/...1011043107

bio INF science BMI

shared by LeopoldS on 24 Aug 10 - Cached
  • LeopoldS on 24 Aug 10
     
    one more try to get you interested in this ... seems that it is slowly but surely moving into the domain of serious science ...
  • Ma Ru on 25 Aug 10
     
    Why don't you try this out? 10 minutes group meditation before every ACT meeting... Should be fun!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 25 Aug 10
     
    Great, just great!! The conclusion seems to be "Thus IBMT could provide a means for improving self-regulation and perhaps reducing or preventing various mental disorders." Why all this neuro-bio-nonsense?? Wasn't this conclusion known before just using good old classic psychology and similar? Again one of these studies that thinks to provide new evidence just because they made a boring brain scan...
Luís F. Simões

Chatbot Wears Down Proponents of Anti-Science Nonsense - 6 views

www.technologyreview.com/...25964

climate_change chatbot twitter

shared by Luís F. Simões on 11 Nov 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • Nigel Leck, a software developer by day, was tired of arguing with anti-science crackpots on Twitter. So, like any good programmer, he wrote a script to do it for him.
  • LeopoldS on 12 Nov 10
     
    fantastic!
santecarloni

Space-time cloak could hide events : Nature News - 3 views

www.nature.com/...news.2010.611.html

phy cloak space-time

shared by santecarloni on 19 Nov 10 - No Cached
LeopoldS liked it
  • santecarloni on 19 Nov 10
     
    I think they are taking it a bit too far....
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 19 Nov 10
     
    I'm a little bit surprised as well about the crude story of the burglar, pure nonsense, of course! But the paper is deadly serious, Alberto and Paul are my best collaborators in metamaterials and optics, they are not this type of TV-show scientists as Leonhardt etc. But as Alberto told me: just put the name "cloak" in the title and you're in all the news. It's not science, it's kindergarden :-(.
  • LeopoldS on 20 Nov 10
     
    is my memory wrong or isn't this what you have already mentioned as theoretically possible a few years back when discussing this, Luzi?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 21 Nov 10
     
    Very well possible that I mentioned this. In fact I was one of the first who took spacetime transformations in transformation optics seriously. But first, my name is not Leonhardt and I don't work at Imperial, that's why nobody cites me and second I most probably found the idea too stupid to be published. You see the two reasons why I'm not successful in science...
pacome delva

How to walk through walls - 6 views

physicsworld.com/...44576

phy transformation_optics

shared by pacome delva on 15 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 15 Dec 10
     
    and yet another TO nonsense... And why always Harry Potter, dont't these darn scientists have more imagination or is their intellectual level just as low as being unable to read more complex literature than J.K. Rawling?? btw.: how about this skype session on TO, Leo?
  • dejanpetkow on 15 Dec 10
     
    Combine it with touchable holography (search for SIGGRAPH 2009 at youtube) and name it Holosuite 0.1.
pacome delva

Higgs hunters face long haul - 2 views

physicsworld.com/...41631

phy higgs particles

shared by pacome delva on 05 Feb 10 - Cached
  • to reduce the chances of the LHC being derailed again by a similar accident, physicists at the Geneva lab have decided to run the collider at just half its design energy for the next 18-24 months.
  • Once the 7 TeV run is over, CERN will shut the LHC down in 2012 for a year or more to prepare it to go straight to maximum-energy 14 TeV collisions in 2013. This will be a complex job that will involve replacing some 10,000 superconducting magnet connections with more robust ones.
  • choosing to stay at lower energies is a big price to pay in terms of the Higgs search. "We will need more than twice the data at 7 TeV compared to that needed at 10 TeV to reach the same discovery potential," she says. "At this energy we can at best expect to exclude a Higgs with a mass between 155 and 175 GeV."
  • pacome delva on 05 Feb 10
     
    no Higgs boson before 2013... and a replacement of 10,000 superconducting magnet connections ! Reminds me of the the gravitational detectors... no detection before an upgrade in 2013...! There are the big announcements to make the cash flow... and reality !
  • Luzi Bergamin on 05 Feb 10
     
    Higgs is almost 81, so he should better invest in his health if he wants the Nobel prize... But who cares, it's another 5 years window where high-energy theorists can produce nonsense with no experimental evidence. They should be happy!
Juxi Leitner

Brain Chips: Artificial Intelligence Is All in Your Head - GigaOM - 1 views

gigaom.com/...artificial-intelligence

brain machine interface technology

shared by Juxi Leitner on 22 Jan 10 - Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 22 Jan 10
     
    Why isn't our good old Raymond Kurzweil mentioned? Some of the nonsense written in that page is one-to-one copy/paste from the Signularity bible...
  • LeopoldS on 23 Jan 10
     
    luzi how I miss you!!!!
Luzi Bergamin

Physics in a Crisis - 3 views

www.rqm.ch/physics_in_a_crisis.htm

phy LHC crackpot fun

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 30 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 30 Mar 10
     
    Luckily I'm far away from Geneva, but this has to be said today, when the LHC starts! No, not tiny black holes will eat us (what a nonsense!), but the supernovae energy will let LHC explode!!! Pacome, I expect you to debunk this with gratest care!
  • ...2 more comments...
  • pacome delva on 30 Mar 10
     
    wtf is this! As I read this morning in the newspaper (not even a scientific one), 1 TeV is the kinetic energy of a flying mosquito... so be careful ! It seems they already sloved every thing on this website: "At the Institute for Space Quantum Physics ISQP, it was already proved in 1991-1992 that dark matter is in magnetic fields as magnetic space quantum flux." This website is the biggest source of crackpots i have seen in a long time...! (http://www.supernovae-energy.com/)
  • Ma Ru on 30 Mar 10
     
    Come on guys, this website is hilarious! "The HAITI EARTHQUAKE (...) were impossible for the Institute for Space Quantum Physics (ISQP) to compute because on one single planet was on a common line or axis with the Sun: Venus."
  • Luzi Bergamin on 30 Mar 10
     
    Unfortunately, most information I have about the guy (Hans Lehner, a Swiss) is in German, his official homepage is http://www.rqm.ch/ According to EsoWatch he is the Swiss analogue to Dr. Mills and his Blacklight power. Lehner apparently founded a company, which should have produced a "Raum-Quanten-Motor" that -- of course -- produces energy out of nothing. The theory is based on spookey forces mediated by Lehneronen. 11 Million Swiss Franks (about 8 Million Euro) were lost when the company bankrupt. And the guy is selling new stocks on his homepage again... Lehner calls another crackpot named Oliver Crane Zweistein (from Einstein being "Onestone") and himself "Dreistein". Now he is looking for Mister or Misses Vierstein. Perhaps you should apply, good luck!!
  • Nicholas Lan on 30 Mar 10
     
    i like the first line of their supernovae energy technology document "Dear potential investor:"...
pacome delva

Novel negative-index metamaterial bends light 'wrong' direction - 1 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...100422153939.htm

phy nan metamaterials

shared by pacome delva on 23 Apr 10 - Cached
  • the first negative index metamaterial to operate at visible frequencies
  • By engineering a metamaterial with such properties, we are opening the door to such unusual -- but potentially useful -- phenomena as superlensing (high-resolution imaging past the diffraction limit), invisibility cloaking, and the synthesis of materials index-matched to air, for potential enhancement of light collection in solar cells
  • Luzi Bergamin on 23 Apr 10
     
    I forwarded the link to my experimental colleagues and here is the comment from Sergei (the master himself:) "this is what Igor has been doing - an array of plasmonic nanocables. This basically works as a wire-medium slab. All their epsilon and mu are rubbish." * If Sergei is as strict as in this comment, then it IS rubbish. He's not one of the notorious complainer (as e.g. myself.) * Please DO NOT FORWARD this to anybody else, Sergei's comment is NOT FOR PUBLIC USE!
  • Luzi Bergamin on 23 Apr 10
     
    UPDATE: I had a short chat with Sergei and Pekka, Sergei noticed that there is an increasing number of papers on metamaterials, especially in Nature and Science, which are simply wrong, this one being an example. * The idea is based on a very well known effect of wired media. What appears to be interesting about this paper is that they manage to make an optical analogue with aparently low losses. This could be interesting. * The whole interpretation as NIM, "wrong" refraction etc. is total nonsense.
  • pacome delva on 23 Apr 10
     
    wow, good to know ! But for the privacy you should be aware that this is a public group, so anyone has access to our comments i think !
Luzi Bergamin

FuturICT: FuturIcT - 2 views

www.futurict.ethz.ch/FuturICT

AI computer SciFi socology

shared by Luzi Bergamin on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Luzi Bergamin on 01 Jun 11
     
    FuturICT, another of these nonsense-flagships. Marek: after having read about this, I understand that BlueBrain is not the only flagship proposal that sucks. Long live the dream of cybernetics, or, apparently people never learn anything...
  • Ma Ru on 01 Jun 11
     
    The others: http://www.ga-project.eu/ - "Guardian Angels for a Smarter Planet" http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ http://www.itfom.eu/ http://www.robotcompanions.eu/ One doesn't have a website (graphene). The message from their presentation was more or less: everyone else does intensive research in this and the Europe should not stay behind. Full list of flagship proposals including short descriptions here: http://www.fet11.eu/about/fet-flagships
Ma Ru

Dark Matter or Black Hole Propulsion? - 1 views

www.newscientist.com/...s-for-interstellar-travel.html

NRG propulsion star travel space PHY

shared by Ma Ru on 25 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Ma Ru on 25 Nov 09
     
    Anyone out there still doing propulsion stuff? Two more papers just waiting to get busted... http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1429v1 http://arxiv.org/abs/0908.1803
  • ...5 more comments...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 26 Nov 09
     
    What an awful bunch of complete nonsense!!! But I don't think anybody wants to hear MY opinion on this...
  • pacome delva on 26 Nov 09
     
    wow, is this serious at all...!?
  • Luzi Bergamin on 26 Nov 09
     
    Are you joking?? The BH drive propses a BH with a lifetime of about an year, just 10^7 tons, peanuts!! Then you have to produce it, better not on Earth, so you do this in space, with a laser that produces an equivalent of 10^9 tons highly foucussed, even more peanuts!! Reasonable losses in the production process (probably 99,999%) are not yet taken into account. Engineering problems... :-) The DM drive is even better, they want to collect DM and compress it in a propulsion chamber. Very easy to collect and compress a gas of particles that traverse the Earth without any interaction. Perhaps if the walls of the chamber are made of artificial BHs?? Who knows??
  • LeopoldS on 26 Nov 09
     
    WRONG!!! we are all just WAITING for your opinion on this ....!!!
  • pacome delva on 27 Nov 09
     
    well, yes my remark was ironic... I'm surprised they did a magazine on these concepts...! But the press is always waiting for sensational. They do not even wait for the work to be peer-reviewed now to make an article on it ! This is one of the bad sides of arxiv in my opinion. It's like a journalist that make an article with a copy-paste in wikipedia ! Anyway, this is of course complete bullsh..., and I would have laughed if I had read this in a sci-fi book... but in a "serious" article i'm crying... For the DM i do not agree with your remark Luzi. It's not dark energy they want to use. The DM is baryonic, it's dark just because it's cold so we don't see it by usual means. If you believe the in the standard model of cosmology, then the DM should be somewhere around the galaxies. But it's of course not uniformly distributed, so a DM engine would work (if at all...) only in the periphery of galaxies. It's already impossible to get there...
  • Luzi Bergamin on 27 Nov 09
     
    One reply to Pacome, though the discussion exceeds by far the relevance of the topic already. Baryonic DM is strictly limited by cosomology, if one believes in these models, of course. Anyway, even though most DM is cold, we are constantly bombarded by some DM particles that come together with cosmic radiation, solar wind etc. etc. If DM easily interacted with normal matter, we would have found it long ago. In the paper they consider DM as neutralinos, which are neither baryonic nor strongly or electromagnetically interacting.
  • pacome delva on 27 Nov 09
     
    well then I agree, how the fu.. they want to collect them !!!
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