Donate
Donate

Gaming the Future: The Book!

Month: December 2009

A Night in the Sun

When I woke up this morning, it was nine degrees below zero, Celsius.  It’s solidly overcast here, and what’s more, this time of year the sun doesn’t get much more than 20 degrees above the horizon — in the middle of an all-too-short day. My house has a footprint of about 200 square meters.  At… Continue reading A Night in the Sun

Some Historical Perspective

At Bryan Caplan’s blog this morning there was an odd comment that stirred up a 40-year old memory: A single sentence in the Durants’ The Age of Napoleon makes me wonder whether I can trust a word they write on economic policy: The memory is that it was reading another part of the Durant’s Story… Continue reading Some Historical Perspective

Prediction

Futurists make lots of predictions, and usually by the time they can be tested they’ve been long forgotten. That’s great when we get them wrong (which is a lot more often than we’d like!) but I take pleasure in claiming I got one right. In this post I wrote: So what’s the next paradigm shift?… Continue reading Prediction

The worlds smallest snowman

The worlds smallest snowman. from nanowerk     The snowman is 10 µm across, 1/5th the width of a human hair. The snowman was made from two tin beads used to calibrate electron microscope astigmatism. The eyes and smile were milled using a focused ion beam, and the nose, which is under 1 µm wide,… Continue reading The worlds smallest snowman

Singularity and the codic cortex

Once upon a time, the story goes, there was a programmer.  He was an amazingly productive programmer, producing thousands of working, debugged lines of code every day. Then he learned about DO-loops. One of the foundational concepts behind the idea of Singularity is the notion of self-improving AI.  And one of the key notions behind… Continue reading Singularity and the codic cortex

Researchers show how proteins slide along DNA to carry out vital biological processes

Researchers show how proteins slide along DNA to carry out vital biological processes. For decades, scientists have known that proteins searching for genetic sequences are able to locate them at rates much faster than expected. They found that rather than moving around the entire three-dimensional space inside a cell, they moved in one-dimension, along DNA… Continue reading Researchers show how proteins slide along DNA to carry out vital biological processes

Cryonics and Philosophy of Mind

There’s an interesting debate between Bryan Caplan and Robin Hanson on their respective blogs. Caplan writes: … Robin didn’t care about biological survival.  He didn’t need his brain implanted in a cloned body.  He just wanted his neurons preserved well enough to “upload himself” into a computer. To my mind, it was ridiculously easy to… Continue reading Cryonics and Philosophy of Mind

It's 0067 AA

(Atomic Age, that is.) From the University of Chicago Library site: On December 2, 1942, scientists at the University of Chicago produced the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in a nuclear pile constructed in a squash court beneath the West Stands of Stagg Field, the University’s athletic stadium. This experiment, crucial to the control… Continue reading It's 0067 AA

IEEE Spectrum: Radios With Micromachined Resonators

IEEE Spectrum: Radios With Micromachined Resonators. It’s likely that better mechanical components, and the cognitive-radio techniques they enable, will usher in the next wave of mobile telephony by giving our cellphones access to much more spectrum. These phones will operate in multiple bands, provide greater data throughput, and minimize if not eliminate the need for… Continue reading IEEE Spectrum: Radios With Micromachined Resonators

Facebook Twitter Youtube Linkedin Podcast Spotify
0
    0
    Your Cart
    Your cart is emptyReturn to Shop
    Continue Shopping

      Search Foresight Institute