Advice solicited. Topics of interest I have lined up for upcoming posts include:

• The history of life on Earth and its important developments
• The nature of the last universal common ancestor (REALLY good new research on this just came out)
• The origin of life and the different schools of thought on it
• Another exploration of time in which I go over a paper that came out this summer that basically did exactly what I did a few months earlier with my "Space and Time Part II" calculations of our point in star and planet order that showed we are not early and are right around when you would expect to find the average biosphere, but extended it to types of stars and their lifetimes in a way I think I can improve upon.
• My thoughs on how and why SETI has been sidetracked away from activities that are more likely to be productive towards activities that are all but doomed to fail, with a few theoretical case studies
• My thoughts on how the Fermi paradox / 'great filter' is an ill-posed concept
• Interesting recent research on the apparent evolutionary prerequisites for primate intelligence

Any thoughts on which of these are of particular interest, or other ideas to delve into?

I found a trick somewhere on the net for clearing a blocked nose (even very blocked). Hold your nose, inhale deeply, then repeat tipping your head back for four seconds, and then forward for four seconds. Breath out slowly. Then hold your breath as long as you can, still tipping forward and back every four seconds and holding your nose. Eventually you inhale and all the gunk just sort of flows out of your nasal cavity. Warning... much gagging, spluttering and spitting at this point. But it's worth it.

Possibly asking something like "you're good at finding points that back up your beliefs, but you also need to spend time thinking about points that might contradict your beliefs. How many contradictory points can you think of over the next five minutes?"

Usually "Monty Hall"?

Could someone point me towards good fictional stories set in Roman times, like those by Kipling in Puck...? Thank you. (Edit: spelling)

I think you are making an unjustified assumption, e.g. "... that I will pop into existence again...", that there is an "I". There is a pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and then later possibly there is another pattern of information that feels that it experiences qualia, and possibly with additional information representing memories corresponding to the first set of information. Shifting to this viewpoint dissolves the question. If we accept that qualia is an illusion then we still have an interesting question about how the illusion occurs, but many other tricky issues go away.

I think Go, the board game, will likely fall to the machines. The driving engine of advances will shift somewhat from academia to industry.

This is a sucker bet. I don't know if you've kept up to date, but AI techniques for Go-playing have advanced dramatically over the last couple of years, and they're rapidly catching up to the best human players. They've already passed the 1-dan mark.

Interestingly, from my reading this is by way of general techniques rather than writing programs that are terribly specialized to Go.

Looking at SHRDLU output just trying to recreate that looks pretty challenging for the modern coder, let alone decades ago. A little Lisp goes a long way.