Kawoomba

Link One of us is no more. > Computer activist Aaron H. Swartz committed suicide in New York City yesterday, Jan. 11. > > The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, was one of the three co-owners of the popular social news site Reddit,...

Hi gang, for the last several months, I've intermittently been wondering about a curious fact I learned. You see, I was under the impression that the universe (as opposed to just the currently observable universe or our Hubble volume) must be finite in its spa[t|c]ial dimensions. I figured that starting...

Article on space.com > Elon Musk, the billionaire founder and CEO of the private spaceflight company SpaceX, wants to help establish a Mars colony of up to 80,000 people by ferrying explorers to the Red Planet for perhaps $500,000 a trip. Relevant Sagan quote: > (...) we've put all our...

Video here, illustrated transcript here. Contains a good sketch of Schmidhuber's Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity. One TEDx passage in particular stuck with me, quoted with context: > In a few decades, such [creative] machines will have more computational power than human brains. > > > This will have...

The "intuitive" (fast) interaction heuristic is predisposed towards selflessness, while the "calculated" (slow) decision making process favors greedier behavior: review of game studies. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22996558 Sidenote: Strange to have a Nature paper conflate a faster-payoff / 'egoistic' approach with being 'rational', and to contrast intuition with calculation, of all things. As...

(Title is tongue-in-cheek, "preservation" would've been more appropriate but less catchy) With [news like that](http://news.discovery.com/history/preserved-brain-bog-england-110406.html), how hard can it be when you actually do want to preserve a brain: > A human skull dated to about 2,684 years ago with an "exceptionally preserved" human brain still inside of it was...