Domain: washington.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to washington.edu.
Comments · 1,905
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Re:Strong AI
I have to say I had the opposite impression. GEB bored me after a while - it all seemed trite, simplistic and obvious and I never finished it. Penrose's books (Shadows of the Mind is the followup) OTOH seemed to proceed from the assumption that we don't know it all and suggest where we might go looking (even his opponents have praise for the review of physics in ENM). There are many interesting questions relating to minds that physics doesn't even know where to begin (one that Penrose doesn't even mention is: Why is there a present moment - not just past and future).
One of the most interesting non-traditional QM theories I have seen is the transactional interpretation put forth by a UW professor. Read all about it. I personally think that what makes us _not_ Turing machines is our ability to comprehend infinity on some level. Strong AI claims that this is an illusion, but TI provides a mechanism that allows for infinite computations in finite time which means that it might not be an illusion after all.
As marks against Penrose, I completely understand the problems with his arguments, but his strong AI opponents have not proved their own case either. Given a choice of where to proceed I come down on the side of present ignorance. History has too often shown that just when we think we know it all something is about to whack us right between the eyes. -
Super-K Neutrino massYou're probably thinking of this Super-K news from June 1998. It is probably the atmospheric neutrino study which is being referred to in the Fermilab neutrino story.
The Fermilab study will use a known neutrino source. Super-K is a directional neutrino detector which can identify differences between neutrinos from overhead, those from underneath (and have traveled the extra time and distance to go through the Earth), and those in the direction of the Sun. Super-K studies the differences between the neutrinos from various directions.
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The good new and the waiting....
>There is also some problems with spherical aberration if they try to make the image too wide and...
Not to mention a problem with whiplash "if they try to make the image too wide." Not a joke. People move their heads a lot when viewing large desk-top monitors. If you view a wide screen you automatically move your head to view things on the extreme right or left. If the image moves with your head... chain reaction and... snap!
Of course, as Thad Starner points out, this is why HIT's body-stabilized-spatial-information-display research project is so important to the future of wearable computing (where monitor resolution isn't so important):
http://www.hitl.washington.edu/res earch/wearint/ -
Okay, I'm a Pine Luser; how do you do this?Well you have to have a newsreader (any one will do, but Pine and the standalone browser are not newsreaders
au contraire, mon frere (ou soeur!). in addition to the internal Pine documentation mentioned above, check out:
Pine FAQ 3.10: How can I use Pine for reading and posting Internet News?
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Paperless toilets (was: The paperless office)According to this link, they have them already in Japan - search for "paperless".
Rich http://www.annexia.org/