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News Briefs 22-09-09

By Jameskeon

Absurdities to make you smarter…

  • Why I love Al Jazeera.
  • Does absurdist literature make you smarter?
  • Will we eventually upload our minds?
  • Fantastic photos of the solar system.
  • Scientists pull an about face on global warming.
  • The holy grail of the unconscious.
  • Mysterious ruins may help explain Mayan collapse.
  • The financial crisis and the bank bail out.
  • Britons warned of plague of supercats.
  • Quiet Sun continues to affect Earth.
  • New species discovered on whale skeletons.
  • Saturn equinox reveals mountains in rings. Big, beautiful image available here.
  • What caused spokes on Saturn’s rings to return?
  • Magnetized gas points to new physics.

Quote of the Day:

If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

Oscar Wilde

Jameske
Related

5 Comments

    1. HAHAWHO?
      [quote=tihz_ho]HAHA

      Cheers[/quote]

      “The Earth has not warmed appreciably for a decade” and “Global worming is not occurring” are not the same, much to the shame of that respectable science journal The Calgary Herald.

      An ice cube doesn’t warm up as it melts. The heat that would otherwise become apparent is taken up in the process of phase change — converting from one form of matter to another. Despite the supposed lack of temperature change (which is disputed by evidence from many sources) the polar and near-polar ice is still melting far beyond anything previously observed. And it’s not just melting ice and other changes of states of matter that can absorb the heat — any significant change in any complex system that comes from an increase in incoming energy or blockage of outgoing energy will result in a phase change in that process as it reconfigures itself. The lack of apparent difference during that period can be mistaken as lack of change. That period of false stability is what comes just before the point of criticality resulting in the jumps in systems with punctuated equilibria.

      1. point taken
        global worming sounds much more horrible than global warming! But the Earth isn’t an ice cube even if some of it has ice.

        So, what’s the amount of human contribution to the heat in comparison to the sun? It would be sods law if the human contribution was just the amount required to tip the scales.

      2. What? HAHA
        What…about ICE growth?

        [quote]ICE is expanding in much of Antarctica, contrary to the widespread public belief that global warming is melting the continental ice cap.

        http://tinyurl.com/c6wyec [/quote]

        [quote]An international team of scientists has used the latest electro-magnetic induction equipment to discover that the Arctic ice is in fact “twice as thick” as they had expected…

        http://tinyurl.com/oq86s4 [/quote]

        [quote]…an error known as sensor drift caused a slowly growing underestimation of Arctic sea ice extent. The underestimation reached approximately 500,000 square kilometres (193,000 square miles) by mid-February.

        http://tinyurl.com/c2gbyo [/quote]

        [quote]Stubborn glaciers fail to retreat, awkward polar bears continue to multiply

        http://tinyurl.com/y8947zh [/quote]

        [quote]Alaskan Glaciers Grow for First Time in 250 years

        http://tinyurl.com/52ovwn [/quote]

        [quote]Much publicity was given, for instance, to Lewis Gordon Pugh, who set out to paddle a kayak to the Pole to demonstrate the vanishing of the Arctic ice. At 80.5 degrees north, still 600 miles short of his goal, he met with ice so thick that he and his fossil-fuelled support ship had to turn back.

        But this did not prevent him receiving a congratulatory call from Gordon Brown, nor boasting that he had travelled “further north than anyone has kayaked so far”.

        It took the admirable Watts Up With That blog, run by the American meteorologist Anthony Watts, to point out that in 1893 the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen found the Arctic so ice-free that he was able to kayak above 82 degrees north, 100 miles nearer the Pole than our hapless campaigner against “unprecedented global warming”. (HAHA)

        http://tinyurl.com/ycdk52b [/quote]

        I suppose we could just…

        “I reject your reality and substitute my own”

        HAHA (again)

        🙂

        Cheers

  2. Uploading “Minds”
    “‘Brain’ is a noun. ‘Mind’ is a verb. ‘Mind’ is what ‘brain’ does.” — Karl Pribram

    Karl’s comment is particularly illustrative with regards to “uploading” anything from the brain. The contents, certainly, in a representative form caused by the internal processes; EEG/MEG is a trivial example. A more accurate and less abstracted recording may become possible, but then it would simply become visible just how much our recordings were confounded by irrelevant processing noise all along. As for uploading the process, “mind”? Not even hypothetically without some amazing dance steps by some as yet unnamed Michio Kaku of neuroscience. The processes are inseparably tied to the processing machinery and will remain that way probably even after we understand how neurons calculate/communicate (we *do* know that neural processing is at once both of these). Sure, a reasonable fake could be pulled off by a large enough computer system that simulates the output; whether or not it simulates the processing in doing so is irrelevant. If, as Karl theorizes, neurons communicate within an extended (millimeters) electrical field covering neighboring dendritic trees, then simulating the process would require using crosstalk between channels in a processor in a controlled fashion in order to process more than what the machine “can”. Personally I suspect that the processes and the processor as so linked that the only way to recreate them is to create them. I remember what fun that was. The elder result of those pursuits recently (August 26) underwent a critical test of his non-artificial intelligence by defending his dissertation, the younger having done so a year or so ago, so with this independent replication I’m confident it works.

    And if it’s artificial intelligence you want, Karl has an even more apt comment: “Simply make it soft and warm and fuzzy and huggable. No matter how smart it is, people will adopt it, take it home, and name it.”

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