Category: Science
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PDLBKBR Part II
A little over two years ago, I attended an event and listened to Brad Templeton speaking about the Google driverless car and how hard it would be for society to adapt to this new method of transportation. I’ve stumbled upon a recording of him lecturing about the topic at “Driving Innovation: A Speaker Series Powered by Nissan…
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PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil
PZ Myers wrote an essay claiming that “Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain”, which has some good points, but is entirely based on the premise that Kurzweil says we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome, that contains 25 million [relevant] bytes, or a million lines of code (second-hand comments on erroneous press reports, taken out…
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Thermodynamics
Brute-force attacks against 256-bit keys will be infeasible until computers are built from something other than matter and occupy something other than space. – Bruce Schneier
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Dr. Aubrey de Grey in Israel
Dr. Aubrey de Grey (Aubrey David Nicholas Jasper de Grey to be exact, age 50) came to Israel for the first time to take part in the 8th European Congress of Biogerontology (fallback link) organized this year by Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Utopia, the Tel-Aviv International Festival for Science Fiction, Imagination and the Future, organized an…
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Spring is Coming
I’m hearing of more and more people starting up new businesses with cool, innovative ideas. Spring season in the Start-up Nation is coming. The differences from the years 2000 and 2008, I think, are: Crowdfunding (Kickstarter, Headstart) Affordable IT Infrastructure (AWS, Google) Affordable and idiot-proof (read: hackable by software engineers) hardware platforms (Raspberry Pi, Arduino) and sensors…
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TED MED: How will nanobots change medicine?
“One word of notice before we begin, all the the technologies you’re going to see here, now, are real…” [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5KLTonB3Pg&w=540&h=304] Nano-robots that fix tissues and control drugs have been envisioned for over 30 years. Now, using DNA origami and molecular programming, they are reality. These nanobots can seek and kill cancer cells, mimic social…
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Space-station Oddity
Moments like these make me believe maybe there’s still a chance for humanity after all. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KaOC9danxNo?rel=0&w=540&h=304] A revised version of David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.
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Lies, damned lies, and statistics
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. – Benjamin Disraeli Mark Twain