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Posts tagged as “Hard Science”

efface[john-mccarthy;universe]

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John McCarthy, creator of Lisp and one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence, has died. He changed the world more than Steve Jobs ... but in a far subtler way, by laying the foundation for programs like Apple's Siri through his artificial intelligence work, or more broadly by laying the foundation for much of modern computing through innovations like the IF-THEN-ELSE formalism. It's important not to overstate the impact of great men like John and Steve; artificial intelligence pioneers like Marvin Minsky would have pushed us forward without John, and companies like Xerox and Microsoft would have pushed us forward without Steve. But we're certainly better off, and farther along, with their contributions. I have only three stories to tell about John McCarthy. The third story is that I last saw him at a conference at IBM, in a mobile scooter and not looking very well. Traveling backwards in time, the second story is that I spoke with one of his former graduate students, who saw a John McCarthy poster in my office, and told me John's illness had progressed to the point where he basically couldn't program any more and that he was feeling very sad about it. But what I want to remember is my first encounter with John ... it's been a decade and a half, so my memory's fuzzy, but I recall it was at AAAI-97 in Providence, Rhode Island. I'd arrived at the conference in a terrible snafu and had woken up a friend at 4 in the morning because I had no place to stay. I wandered the city looking for H.P. Lovecraft landmarks and had trouble finding them, though I did see a house some think inspired Dreams in the Witch House. But near the end, at a dinner for AI folks, I want to say at Waterplace Park but I could be misremembering, I bumped in to John McCarthy. He was holding court at the end of the table, and as the evening progressed I ended up following him and a few friends to a bar, where we hung out for an evening. And there, the grand old man of artificial intelligence, still at the height of his powers, regaled the wet-behind-the-ears graduate student from Atlanta with tales of his grand speculative ideas, beyond that of any science fiction writer, to accelerate galaxies to the speed of light to save shining stars from the heat death of the universe. We'll miss you, John. -Anthony Image stolen shamelessly from Zach Beane's blog. The title of this post is taken from the Lisp 1.5 Programmer's Manual, and is the original, pre-implementation Lisp M-expression notation for code to remove an item from a list.

Who Am I?

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me in front of the bell bridge books promotional material for BLOOD ROCK Who are you? Good question. I'm Anthony Francis, and I write stuff and make computers jump through hoops for a living. What have you done? I'm most notable for the EPIC award winning urban fantasy novel FROST MOON and its sequel, BLOOD ROCK, which are about magical tattoo artist Dakota Frost and are therefore hopefully both more interesting than my ~700 page PhD thesis on context-sensitive computer memory. Also on the computer side, I've done some exploration of robot emotions. What are you doing next? Forthcoming in the Dakota Frost series is the third book, LIQUID FIRE, and this November for National Novel Writing Month I plan to work on HEX CODE, the first in a spin-off series featuring Dakota's adopted daughter Cinnamon Frost. Are you working on anything other than Dakota Frost? I've also recently completed a rough draft of the first book in a new series, JEREMIAH WILLSTONE AND THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE. A short story set in this universe, "Steampunk Fairy Chick", will be included in the forthcoming anthology UnCONventional. What are you working on currently? I'm also currently working on a fourth new series with the working title STRANDED, a young adult science fiction novel set a thousand years in the future, featuring a spoiled young centauress who must rescue a shipload of children who have crashlanded upon a world she wanted to claim as her own. This story's set in the "Library of Dresan" universe from which this blog takes its name and which was setting of my very first unpublished novel "homo centauris", which I am now happily milking for its 57 billion year backstory. Anything else? I have a flash fiction story called "The Secret of the T-Rex's Arms" to appear on the Smashed Cat Magazine. I've also published one short story, "Sibling Rivalry" in the Leading Edge Magazine. I have a webcomic, f@nu fiku, on hiatus. And I'm actively involved with helping people succeed at 24 Hour Comics through tutorials that I and my friend Nathan Vargas have put together at Blitz Comics. Is that enough questions for now? Yes, it is. Please enjoy. -the Centaur

Try to eat less than a million bananas a year

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Why? Bananas are naturally slightly radioactive. While it's unlikely your body could retain all that radioactive potassium in those bananas, if it did you'd absorb enough radiation to cause an increased cancer risk: xkcd radiation chart There are disputes about those figures, of course, but at ~105 calories a banana, you're getting roughly 143 times your daily allotment of 2000 calories, so probably you should cut back anyway. -the Centaur P.S. One BED (Banana Equivalent Dose) is 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. XKCD claims that 100 millisieverts of radiation is the lowest dose linked to increased cancer risk. Take that with a grain of salt ... but do the math.

So you’re going to be a stem cell donor …

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anthony at mervyn's after receiving unrelated good news ... or, actually, I'm going to be a stem cell donor. Only 1 in 20,000 actually match, so this is pretty lucky. If all goes well with the physical and blood tests, I'll be helping out someone who's got few remaining options. Good things do happen. -the Centaur P.S. No grief, only 1 in 20,000 match. So check out Be The Match dot org and consider getting your cheek swabbed. Somewhere out there someone may be depending on you - so no pressure.

What Is Consciousness?

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what information is beautiful thinks i think about consciousness infographic on consciousness as functionalism The ever wonderful chaps at Information is Beautiful have put up a beautiful animated infographic of many of the major theories of consciousness. Click on the graphic to the right to see them all ... I'm essentially a functionalist but try to keep an open mind. OK, I can state it more forcefully than that: I believe, and believe I can point to evidence for, that consciousness performs many important functions, and I want to know what they all are, how they work together, and how they relate to the other functions of the brain. If we do build up a solid picture of that, however, it won't surprise me too much if we find interesting phenomena left over that require us rethinking everything we've done up to that point. -the Centaur UPDATE: Ooo, there's even more to the graphic than I thought ... you can click on the brains and get it to produce a composite graphic of what "your" theory of consciousness is.

It’s … radiation

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radiation doses for various things Over at Information is Beautiful they've got a chart detailing the levels of radiation at the Fukushima nuclear disaster compared with other things, like the radiation at Chernobyl (bad) and the radiation for eating a banana (not so much). As XKCD tried to put into perspective earlier, the radiation at the plant is a real threat to the heroic workers trying to shut it down ... but for the rest of us, not so much. Sorry, folks. Radiation is just not as dangerous as you've been told in the movies and the media - we simply try to keep exposure low because the effects are random. And even if you do get a fatal dose, it won't give you superpowers. -the Centaur

Need a mental tuneup?

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XKCD on Misconceptions What do you get for somebody who thinks they know everything? A dose of realism! Here are a few useful links to get started: Follow the links, then follow more of them. Lots of good stuff in there - I sure found holes in what I thought I knew. -the Centaur

Conventions … not the fan kind

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I've picked up a fair number of conventions over the years ... notations, ways of writing things to make the type of thing that I'm writing clear. Most of these I've picked up from others, some are my own. Here are a few of them:
  • Novel titles are written in ALL CAPS
    You write novels this way to make it clear that it's a BOOK you're talking about, dag nab it. Examples: FROST MOON, ATLAS SHRUGGED, ULYSSES. I picked up this convention from my publisher, Bell Bridge Books.
  • Search queries are written in [square brackets]
    You write search queries this way, rather than with quotes, because quotes can appear in search queries. Examples: [frost moon], ["frost moon"] - note the results are not the same. I picked up this convention from The Search Engine That Starts With a G.
  • Command line text is indented in a special format where the prompt is bold, the command is bold italic, and the command response is plain text.
This last one takes more explanation (and breaking out of the unordered list to overcome WordPress CSS theme issues). When including command line responses in email, you indent the entire excerpt to set it apart from your message, then put the command prompt in bold, the command in bold italic, and its response in plain text, like so:
centaur@mobile (Sat Jul 24, 00:44:54) [501] ~:
$ imagelink comicon-2010-01.jpg san diego comicon 2010

<a href="http://www.dresan.com/images/comicon-2010-01.jpg" alt="san diego comicon 2010"><img src="https://www.dresan.com/images/comicon-2010-01.jpg" alt="san diego comicon 2010" border="0" width="600" /></a>
Some WordPress or theme weirdness is making this formatting a little harder than it is in Gmail. I think this is fixed to the point that you should be able to see that the "informational" part of the prompt (when the command was executed) appears on its own line, with a colon and line break to separate it from the command proper. The command proper is prefixed by a dollar sign, a UNIX standard that distinguishes it from the response text that follows. This communicates and distinguishes when you did it, what you did, and what you got. This one is mine. I've been developing this convention over the years as a way of communicating results from the command line in email. I have to admit, this is driven in part by a bit of egoism: I want people to know that the results I'm sending them can be done in one line of Bash, Sed and (g)AWK. And the remaining part is, I want people to learn that yes, they too can in a minute do immense amounts of computation with Bash, Sed and AWK. That's all for now. Next time: why the Einstein summation notation is cool. -the Centaur

How quickly can lava burn through your shoe?

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Not fast enough:
There was a case a few years ago where a geologist accidentally stepped into some lava. The nylon laces of his boots burned off almost instantly but the thick leather did not, and he had only minor burns on his foot. After that we all made sure that we only wear real leather boots out on active flows, not the lightweight part-nylon kind.
Revenge of the Sith, it ain't. Still, I'm not swimming in it.

-the Centaur

UPDATE: Reading around a bit on the site, it turns out if you aren't wearing one of those metal bunny suits you can catch on fire from radiant heat, so Revenge of the Sith, it is.

Hey, *my* birthday is coming up *too*…

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... you might think about this:
Space shuttle for sale, fully loaded, air conditioning, one careful owner. It's the ultimate bargain. NASA has cut the price of a space shuttle to $28.8 million. The vehicles will go on sale after they finish constructing the International Space Station, scheduled to be later this year.
I take no credit for the "my birthday is coming up" joke, which I stole shamelessly from my coworker Othar Hansson.
-the Centaur