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The average human brain is 1.5 kg. The average Asian elephant brain is 7.5 kg. Are Asian elephants 5 times smarter than men?
More data here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm

Yummiest thing you can have only* in Norway

Ah, but Where can you see Lions?

Yummiest thing you can have only* in Norway
(* = So probably not in your country, except if you're japanese or from iceland/greenland )

Essentially, the Singularity is a mirror. It is in some ways just a mirror of our own choice of virtues or lack thereof.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtues

LIke Harry Potter looking into the mirror or Erised, Ray Kurzweil looks into that mirror of the Singularity and sees himself: a very logically intelligent business person interested in accelerating technology by promoting artificial scarcity through patents and copyrights. Thus, he pushes for a singularity filled with competition and artificial scarcity, rather than one filled with cooperation and abundance for all. What's the danger in that? While we may not know enough yet to make a friendly AI with humane values, we certainly know enough to make some nasty dumb replicators and military robotics programmed to kill widely, plus we already have nuclear and bio weapons. As I say here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
"Perhaps our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially minds following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. And if nobody listens to Albert Einstein about this, why should they listen to me?"

Kurzweil also doesn't understand ecology and evolution very well, in terms of making assumptions about the value of intelligence without seeing how it plays an adaptive role in only certain ecological niches.

More comments on those themes as emails I've sent to Ray Kurzweil, archived by someone else here:
http://heybryan.org/fernhout/

What does this chart suggest about a law of diminishing returns for being more intelligent? :-)
http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm

Look at the ratios, and see the Fin whale ratio of brain to bodymass. It's tiny.

Bigger may be better up to a point, but it looks like a law of diminishing returns sets in.

One might posit some sort of inverse square law for the usefulness of increasing amounts of computational capacity to an organism, given perhaps exponentially increasing difficulty in creating more detailed or longer-term predictions of the world. This is an issue weather forecasters may wrestle with, in terms of facing chaotic behavior impacting predictability in weather systems. It's called "the Butterfly effect" where a small mistake or mismeasure may have increasingly big implications over time. So there is a need for constant remeasuring and recalibration of the models, which reduces the value of predictions and related computations. This is kind of like a game of chess where pieces were moved randomly by outside forces every once in a while, reducing the value in looking ahead too much.

Obviously, architecture can play a part in changes in intelligence too. But even Jupiter Brains might get dementia or turn uncommunicative.

Anyway, so this ratio of brain sizes and body mass may suggest the same thing. It's not that bigger is not better in some sense, it is just that it it only justifiable energetically up to a point.

Consider that a Right whale's testes may weigh over a two thousand pounds compared to that whale's fifteen pound or so brain, or about 100X bigger, whereas for humans the ratio is approximately reversed, the brain 100X larger. (Fin whales' testes are closer to 100 pounds, or 7X brain size, but still much larger than their brains.) So, you can see what nature is betting on when body size goes up. :-)

It's not like whale's could not easily have brains that were 10X bigger. Whales are social, and even communicate around the p

Greenpeace lost its way a long time ago. Even one of its founders couldn't stomach its new direction.

There is no "Great Bear Rain-Forest". I live where it is supposed to be and they just made that up for publicity. There is a rain forest, and it has bears, but no one outside of Greenpeace calls it that.

They used to do good. Now they are just fear mongers.

I can't find any source for this accusation but this one, which is written by a pro-whaling organization, in association with Norwegian Whalers' Union. It's not reliable. Do you have any other sources for this, from someone other than polluting capitalists, seal hunters, oil companies, whalers etc?

I can't find any source for this accusation but this one, which is written by a pro-whaling organization, in association with Norwegian Whalers' Union. It's not reliable. Do you have any other sources for this, from someone other than polluting capitalists, seal hunters, oil companies, whalers etc?

In Carl Sagan's book 'Dragons of Eden', he links intelligence not with brain size, but with the ratio of brain size to body mass. He backs this up with some reasonable-seeming examples. I found a few here: http://www.highnorth.no/Library/Myths/br-si-bo.htm . Hm, except this makes mice out to be smarter than men. Explains the Douglas Adams worldview, I suppose.

It's a good read. He then goes on to analyze the Genesis story, and how the curse God inflicts on human females to endure painful childbirth after eating of the tree of knowledge is linked to the fact that our oversized noggins make the birthing process more difficult.

because we have brains a few thousand times larger than mice, not because of any special virtue of our brain tissue, and our brain cells are certainly not going to be optimal for controlling a mouse's body and living as a mouse

Wrong.

Your argument at best is an oversimplification.

>I was wondering if you care to support your outlandish claims that we support ecoterrorism?

Oh, please, don't make it so easy!

Tree spiking murders innocent workers.

A quote from Mr. Paul Watson (as a Greenpeace member, I'm certian you know of him, as he is a principal founder of your organization)

"I was the person who first thought up the tactic of tree-spiking and as such I feel obligated to defend this child of my imagination." (Link)

Care to make me find more examples?

>We do not and will not tolerate ecoterrorism.

That's why the principal founders of your organization devise murderous tactics, right?

It doesn't sound like a sane organization when it's founded by people like Paul Watson.

>Greenpeace is a very upright environmental organization.

Excellent. Tell me what happened to your boats in British Columbia on July 3, 1997. Find me a link to the info on the greenpeace website, if you're so upright.

Of course, we won't find one, because on that day the people of Victoria, BC fought back and blockaded YOUR boats.

>We have many worthwhile causes.

Many? Care to name 3 that aren't runing people's lives?

>You might not agree with protesting, but it's hardly any type of terrorism.

Hey, I agree with protesting. But protesting doesn't include blockades and property invasion. That crosses the line of protesting (which is marches in the streets, passing leaflets, general education of the public) and becomes sets of criminal acts, even in countries with the most liberal of free speech laws, such as the US. Criminals don't deserve to benefit from their work.

>or the illegal logging in the Amazon

Which you defend through such extreme violations of the law you become pirates yourselves, charged under laws intended for true pirates (such as yourselves -- it's shameful to take over other people's private property like that -- all the more reason the world will have to continue to arm itself against radicals such as yourselves). For some reason it's wrong to pirate logs, but just fine to pirate ships.

You can't be serious.

>I don't know of many other organizations that stand up for the thousands killed in Bophal

You have to go back 2 decades to find something decent Greenpeace did?

That's sad. But, sadder still, is the proof that your protesting really was worth nothing:

"Meanwhile, very little of the money from the settlement reached with Union Carbide went to the survivors, and people in the area feel betrayed not only by Union Carbide (and chairman Warren Anderson,) but also by their own politicians. On the anniversary of the tragedy, effigies of Anderson and politicians are burnt."

At least the US Government managed to squeeze some money out for them. I wonder, how much did Greenpeace give?

Now, for my final point, care to respond to this?

"IT'S OFFICIAL: GREENPEACE SERVES NO PUBLIC PURPOSE"

Revenue Canada, the tax-collecting arm of the government, has refused to recognize the new Greenpeace Environmental Foundation as a charity, saying its activities have "no public benefit" and that lobbying to shut down industries could send people "into poverty."

"But according to court records made public in June by John Duncan, the Reform MP from British Columbia, the federal charities division found the group's activities "have not complied with the law" on charitable organizations."

"The recent Greenpeace campaigns against PVC plasticisers and

Do you have a reference regarding your claim about brain mass to body mass ratio? This seems to indicate otherwise. (Mice are highest, humans are second, various dolphins are third and fourth.. whales are pretty far down.)

Using remote controlled rats reminds me of those controversial military dolphin programmes that both the Soviets, and the Americans seemed to carry out.
Even though I'm not exactly an animal rights activist this still all sounds a bit... unnecessary. Especially when there are alternatives.

I worked briefly in a SAR robot project, while I was at Edinburgh University. Myself and two other MSc students got together and built 2 SAR robots, to participate in the SAR event at Robocup 2001, Seattle. Even though our project wasn't really ready in time (read, the heat-seeking robots rather chase the CNN cameraman than find victims, and didn't report at all to the base station) I did learn a lot from just being there.

For example, I learnt how difficult it is to remote control a robot using only its on-board cameras/sensors. One of Murphy's Urbies was due for repair when its human-operator managed to drive it down a flight of stairs, and I quote Murphy, "without ever touching the stairs". :)
And this difficulty is ever so larger when the robots go inside rubble, with lack of light, and the well known radio control problems/outages.
Human control also limits the number of robots you can deploy, assuming you need 1 operator per robot.

Autonomous robot swarms are only possible if the robots are small and cheap, so you can deploy dozens or hundreds and accept a number of 'losses'. But this approach has its own disadvantages, such as small size meaning less sensorial capabilities for example. What good are dozens of little crawlers that just step on top of the victim's heads without ever detecting them?

In the event debriefing meeting, where sponsored teams had to make a small presentation, this Few_Big_Expensive vs many_small_cheap issue was debated. I believe there must be a compromise, and whoever finds the right balance will be half-way there.

As far as rats... I'd rather hear about research into fluorescent heat-seeking 'intelligent' jelly, that is poured on top of the rubble, seeks victims, attaches itself around their body keeping them worm (but intelligent enough to stay away from eyes, hears, nose, and mouth) and nutritionally rich so the victim can eat it if required... ;)

From the Marine Mammal Myths page:

The brain of the sperm whale weighs 7,800g, the elephant's weighs 7,500g, man's weighs 1,500g, the dolphin's 840g, and the brain of a mouse weighs 0,4g. If these figures are used to determine intelligence, then the sperm whale and the elephant are five times as intelligent as man, who in turn is twice as intelligent as the dolphin, which in turn is 2,000 times as intelligent as a mouse. Should we rank animals in order of how large their brains are in relation to their body weight, then the mouse would come out on top with its brain comprising 3.2%, the dolphin's 0.9% and the sperm whale's 0,021%. Neither absolute brain weight nor the relationship between brain weight and body size provide us with sensible criteria for comparing the intelligence of different species.