Well, dad seems to be okay. One artery with minor occlusion, but sufficient blood flow. He's on statin medication, and some checkup in a time period(6 months, a year?)

new This Week In Intelligence, I hope to do this once a week, on friday night. If that works out, we can see what else might happen.

I've got my few remaining mailing lists on daily digest, and they're still too boring and time-wasting. I hope it's just a phase. All the boring people live in winter climates, perhaps.

On the upside, S. Korea is building offensive robots.

Coronary catheterization

I have never been very good at suffering uncertainty and fear. In fact, you might say that a major motivation in my early years to learn so much was to try to reduce the size of the mysteries and shadows that I felt confronted with.

Having precise names for things, facts about them, understanding what gives rise to their existence, it makes me feel better. Quite aside from the options and real control it does give you, it makes me feel better almost immediately, in proportion to how well I think I understand.

So tonight I google and read studies and think about what my father (David Corwin) will be doing tomorrow morning in Utah.

Almost ten years ago I realized that my father was the highest risk person in my immediate family, in terms of medical emergencies. His father died of heart disease.

It's things like this that make you appreciate the rate of medical progress. Both the positive and the negative. A few things have changed very rapidly in coronary medicine, others are virtually unchanged from the sixties.

A few more years may bring great medical progress, or it may bring hardly nothing. Or it may be irrelevant and too late.

For now, he's going to learn more tomorrow. And so will I. Which I approve of, less mysteries. And then we'll see what applies.

A new project. I'm going to post once a week on news, views, and my commentary thereof, relating to Intelligence.

I define the scope of This Week in Intelligence to be either scientific or engineering subjects relating to both intelligence itself, and intelligent systems. So it should be of interest to people who want to know both how humans think, and how thinking itself works.

Almost everything we do, feel, or avoid is primarily affected by the character of our intelligence, which everyone shares. We notice the social differences, and they're important to us, because they are how we tell each other apart. But there is a vast shared pool of attributes which we rarely investigate, which I think will be very interesting if it can be explored well.

I have several ambitions for This Week in Intelligence, but we'll just see how it goes.

A good day here at a2i2. Peter has gone to London, and has left us with the assignment of working on theory, just theory.

Now, I've been involved for quite a long time now, in the planning and working out of cognitive elements. But it is very rare that I get to do pure research, and it is an animal pleasure which I savor when the opportunity to do it comes along.

You see, it so rarely actually pays to do open-ended research, because the results are uncertain, and there is so often concrete, known and defined things that we know we need to do. Progress on those fronts informs theory, and makes it in turn more concrete. We progress this way, surely, but perhaps more incrementally.

But under it all is theoretical understanding, which is why occasional forays into scientific investigation are needed to fuel the engineering we usually do. A little understanding makes everything easier to do, and so these investigations can sometimes pay off very well.

Quite aside from the fact that I enjoy having as a job the explicit instructions "think about this", I think/and hope that it will lead to good things for the company as well.

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Man's static jacket sparks alert

Just noticed this. That's some serious static.

Here at a2i2, we've been very busy. We had someone here to try working with us, unfortunately it didn't work out.

Crystal went home on sunday, which is sad. We're plotting to get her out here for a longer period of time when she's out of school. As much as I like these mini-vacations of visiting back and forth, I'd much rather be around her on a more regular (if less intense) basis. It would be less disruptive, and more fun, I think. A sense of normalcy is worth a lot, sometimes.

I'm considering gathering up news and resources on intelligence in a weekly blog or something, which may be of interest to my friends who fancy themselves plugged into the stuff that makes us behave and feel the way we do, and how our potential children will think as well.

Wil McCarthy's Hacking Matter is free online now:
http://www.wilmccarthy.com/hm.htm

SONGS TO WEAR PANTS TO

This guy takes requests and makes songs based on them.

Creative, and not bad music.

He also takes commissions for longer, more serious, songs.

He's responsible for at least two songs that I've heard elsewhere on the internet unattributed, so you know they're catchy when someone steals them.

"Mike Celestino, what have you done with Star Wars" is probably my favorite, a request about a geek's lament that the new star wars movies are no good.

AGIRI Forums -> AGI Workshop - DC, May 20-21, 2006

Anybody going to this?

It was just brought to my attention.