Friday, June 16, 2006

Human Experimentation

Savant-like numerosity skills revealed in normal people by magnetic pulses

Perception abstract

Well, perhaps IA isn't that far away after all.

Blogged with Flock

Tiger! Tiger!

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

The Stars My Destination - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This was my favorite book as a teen, and I still think it's a classic of the genre.

Gully Foyle is the classic driven man, who is transformed by the needs of his goal, vengeance. For being passed by a ship, when he was marooned in deep space. He goes from a third-class midshipman to become a dangerous commando, a dandy of high society, and an inmate in the fictional future Super-Max Prison equivalent.

I'd recommend it to anyone looking for classic sci-fi with psychological elements. It predated cyberpunk(my favorite genre) by almost forty years, yet anticipates many of the elements.

This book also shaped my view of capitalism and corporations as fundamentally much stronger forces than governments and councils, an opinion I still hold. It also introduces the concept of a corporation serving the vision of a single person, which I aspire to. The best intro in all of literature is still that of the CEO/Owner of the eponymous Presteign Corporation. "I am Presteign, of Presteign."

Blogged with Flock

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Doom predicted in our time.

http://www.doomsdaycurve.com

An interesting, if misanthropic and misguided, flash presentation.


Wierdly enough, it was put together by a legal advocate of the adult entertainment industry, to argue that there are more pressing concerns that prosecuting his clients.

Blogged with Flock

Saturday, June 10, 2006

space and games

Strangely, few people I know on the transhumanist lists have very large web presences. The most we tend to get up to are a few essays, a blog perhaps, and our affiliated organizations.

Here is a new (relatively) blog to add to that roll, by Peter de Blanc, whose writing on his blog are frankly quite superior some of the discussions he's been involved in on the SL4 list, which is only to be expected, I suppose.

Thursday, June 01, 2006

Public Library of Science: Home

An interesting effort towards open science, where authors pay and access is free. They run six journals, all of whom have increasingly high profiles. PLoS Computational Biology in particular is now one of the most cited in the field.