Dark Planetoid

CCHits: Digg-Clone Site for Creative Commons Music

2008-03-05T11:11:00.001-05:00

CChits is a web-app meant to help people find and share cool music that's been released under Creative Commons licenses. It's built on Ning, a site that makes it easy to clone and customize web applications; in this case, CChits clones the popular link-sharing site Digg.

read more | digg story

Ray Kurzweil: Machines Will Match Human Intelligence By 2029

2008-03-05T11:02:00.001-05:00

"I've made the case that we will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029," he said.

read more | digg story

Nokia Morph

2008-02-26T11:47:00.005-05:00

Nanotech future

From the press release:

Nokia and University of Cambridge launch the Morph – a nanotechnology concept device

New York, US and Espoo, Finland — Morph, a joint nanotechnology concept, developed by Nokia Research Center (NRC) and the University of Cambridge (UK) - was launched today alongside the “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, on view from February 24 to May 12, 2008, at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Morph features in both the exhibition catalog and on MoMA’s official website.

Morph is a concept that demonstrates how future mobile devices might be stretchable and flexible, allowing the user to transform their mobile device into radically different shapes. It demonstrates the ultimate functionality that nanotechnology might be capable of delivering: flexible materials, transparent electronics and self-cleaning surfaces.

Google's Android SDK Videos

2008-02-22T11:07:00.001-05:00

Google has videos with some cool demos of applications for their Android platform for mobile phones.

"The Android platform is a software stack for mobile devices including an operating system, middleware and key applications."

Android

The Open Handset Alliance

"Find your music in the computational universe"

2005-12-30T12:44:00.000-05:00

WolframTones uses cellular automata to create musical compositions.

Extraordinary Flowers

2005-12-06T09:25:00.000-05:00

New York City artist Katinka Matson uses a scanner and Photoshop to create "surreally real" images of flowers.

"New technologies equal new perceptions. We create tools and then mould ourselves through our use of them."

"Images created by scanning direct-to-CCD cut away layers, and go to a deeper place in us than our ordinary seeing and vision."

Blind Shrike

2005-12-06T09:03:00.000-05:00

I just read Richard Kadrey's great novel Blind Shrike that is available for free online at The Infinite Matrix.

With the help of a blind swordswoman, tattooed Spyder begins a gleefully dark journey from the alleys of San Francisco to the depths of Hell, from the Bardo Lounge to the Bardo Realm....

Plantronics Unveils Industry's First Bluetooth® Stereo Headset that Switches Between Music Devices, Laptops and Mobile Phones

2005-09-19T12:45:00.000-05:00

Plantronics, Inc. introduced the Pulsar^TM 590, a Bluetooth stereo headset that lets users listen wirelessly to music and movies with excellent audio quality and switch seamlessly to mobile phone calls with the single touch of a button.

Available with a universal Bluetooth audio adapter, the Pulsar 590 provides immediate wireless compatibility for any device with a headphone jack, such as laptops, home stereos, MP3 players, including Apple iPods, and multimedia devices, such as Sony PSP.

"The Pulsar 590 demonstrates the desirable look of Plantronics' new design initiative and underscores our commitment to providing diverse Bluetooth offerings that deliver quality sound, are easy to use and provide long-wearing comfort," said Renee Niemi, vice president of Mobile and Entertainment at Plantronics.

Robot Snakes

2005-09-19T12:29:00.000-05:00

SnakeRobots.com shows the work of inventor Dr. Gavin Miller who is studying snake locomotion. He wants to use snake robots for search and rescue missions.

"By attempting to build robots that emulate and perhaps match the capabilities of their biological counterparts, it is possible that we will create useful tools capable of carrying sensors, taking samples, and making physical changes in a wide variety of environments."

Fuel Cells for Mobile Phones

2005-09-16T12:07:00.000-05:00

One of the limiting factors for mobile phone technology has been the power supply.
Advanced smart phone features like audio, video, and text messaging drain lots of power and future features will use even more power. Mobile fuel cells may be the power supply of the future for mobile computing and smart phones.

According to a NanoMarkets report, the mobile fuel cell market could be $2.7 billion by 2012.

NTT DoCoMo and Fujitsu Laboratories have developed a methanol fuel cell prototype portable recharger for 3G FOMA handsets that will allow eight hours of continuous talk time. We should see fuel cell portable rechargers on the market soon.

Smart Dust

2005-09-08T11:49:00.000-05:00

Autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimeter

The Smart Dust project is funded by DARPA.

One possible application of smart dust is a virtual keyboard:

"Glue a (smart) dust mote on each of your fingernails. Accelerometers will sense the orientation and motion of each of your fingertips, and talk to the computer in your watch. You can imagine much more useful and creative ways to interface to your computer if it knows where your fingers are: sculpt 3D shapes in virtual clay, play the piano, gesture in sign language and have the computer translate."

"Combined with a MEMS augmented-reality heads-up display, your entire computer I/O would be invisible to the people around you. Couple that with wireless access for surfing the web."

New algorithm found for learning languages

2005-09-07T09:37:00.000-05:00

"The algorithm -- the computational method -- for language learning and processing that we have developed can take a body of text, abstract from it a collection of recurring patterns or rules and then generate new material..."

-- Shimon Edelman

Original Physorg.com Article >>>

MIT Technology Review on Social Machines

2005-09-07T09:17:00.000-05:00

"When computing devices are always with us, helping us to be the social beings we are, time spent "on the computer" no longer feels like time taken away from real life. And it isn't: cell phones, laptops, and the Web are rapidly becoming the best tools we have for staying connected to the people and ideas and activities that are important to us. The underlying hardware and software will never become invisible, but they will become less obtrusive, allowing us to focus our attention on the actual information being conveyed. Eventually, living in a world of continuous computing will be like wearing eyeglasses: the rims are always visible, but the wearer forgets she has them on--even though they're the only things making the world clear."

Original MIT Technology Review Article >>>

Deceit of the Raven

2005-09-07T08:29:00.000-05:00

Deceitful ravens teach humans a thing or two.

"It turns out that even birds know how to cheat and read minds."

"Science is chipping away at the case for human uniqueness, showing that animals and machines are more like us than we believed."

"What happens, as these trends continue, to the familiar guideposts for deciding what is human?"

Original New York Times Article >>>

Is The Singularity Near?

2005-09-07T07:16:00.000-05:00

"The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology" is futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil's newest book. He believes that "technological change is exponential" and that we may see 20,000 years of progress in the 21st century.

Psychedelics, Einstein, and Elves, Oh My!

2005-09-01T07:59:00.000-05:00

Clifford A. Pickover's latest book will expand your mind with wide-ranging topics from sushi and zombies to quantum immortality, psychedelic Shakespeare, Tinkertoy minds, parallel universes and much more.

Perplex City

2005-08-18T11:53:00.000-05:00

I received an email last week from a mysterious girl named Scarlett Kiteway about the missing Receda cube stolen from the Perplexians and concealed somewhere on Earth.

Hi. My name's Scarlett Kiteway, I'm 20 years old and I live in Perplex City, which is... well, it's not on Earth. If you're wondering how I got your address - the truth is that I took it from my dad, Sente. He doesn't know, but I just needed someone to talk to - there have been some pretty weird things going on over here. I need to talk about what's going on, but I can't really tell anyone in the City about it....

Perplex City is an altered reality game (ARG) where the boundary between reality and the game is blurred. Clues to the location of the cube are on a series of cards with various puzzles that often require lateral thinking. There is supposed to be a $200,000 prize for finding the cube.

On this card you are supposed to find two side-effects of Ceretin. Ceretin nicknamed "Sharp Red" is a drug used to sharpen attention and provide selective cognitive enhancement. Cognivia is the fictional company that manufactures cognitive enhancement drugs like Ceretin.

Cyborg performance artist STELARC

2005-08-08T11:21:00.000-05:00

Cyborg performance artist STELARC believes that we are zombies and cyborgs.

I think it is interesting that it was so easy for Stelarc to adapt
to using a third hand. He is able to write with his third hand. We can
adapt to machines/tools and incorporate them as extensions of our
bodies. This is nothing new of course, we have been doing this since
humans began using tools.

Psymbiote: Hybrid Apparatus for Social Interface

2005-08-08T10:34:00.000-05:00

Psymbiote

Adorned in titanium, latex, silicone, and electronic apparatus, isa/Psymbiote places herself in the eye of the storm: the conceptual terrain at the collision of bodies and machines, the mutation of her own identity through transformation of the body. Ultimately the project seeks to fully transform the artist into a seductively organic yet entirely unfamiliar hybrid organism, a human/machine chimera with fully integrated control systems. The costume is being animated with movement, sound, and light; activated by manual triggers, automatic body processes, and remote control. As her evolution progresses, Psymbiote appears in public spaces to stimulate dialogue regarding the future of technological enhancements to the human body. She has already been sighted at a number of universities, art shows, international conferences, and as host of the SIGGRAPH CyberFashion Show. The Psymbiote Project brings issues raised by the ongoing redefinition of our bodies into a public forum, highlighting some of the contemporary critical discourse surrounding cyborgs and all forms of human/technology integration.

Summer Science Reading

2005-08-08T10:02:00.000-05:00

If you are looking for some Summer science reading, Edge.org has some recommendations.

Edge.org Summer Reading List

Vernor Vinge on the Singularity

2005-08-08T09:34:00.000-05:00

An annotated version of Vinge's classic essay "Technological Singularity".

Human/Machine Anomalies

2005-07-20T12:41:00.000-05:00

Can human consciousness influence the outcome of random experiments?

Researchers at Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR), have found significant deviations from chance expectations in random experiments, where human operators try to influence the outcome.

Wiring the Brain at the Nanoscale

2005-07-14T11:55:00.000-05:00

Nanowires in blood vessels may help monitor, stimulate neurons in the brain

Neuroscientist Rudolfo Llinas and his colleagues envision an entire array of nanowires being connected to a catheter tube, which could then be guided through the circulatory system to the brain. Once there, the nanowires would spread into a kind of bouquet, branching out into tinier and tinier blood vessels until they reached specific locations. Each nanowire would then be used to record the electrical activity of a single nerve cells, or small groups of nerve cells.

Courtesy: National Science Foundation

The Edge of Biocomputation

2005-06-30T07:20:00.000-05:00

Scientific pioneers Ray Kurzweil, J. Craig Venter and Rodney Brooks discuss the future of biocomputation at the Edge Reality Club.

"We are entering a new era. Some of us call it the Singularity. It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it has occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny, and part of the destiny of evolution, to continue to progress ever faster and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially."
-- Ray Kurzweil

Extracting Video from Cat Brains

2005-06-24T12:07:00.000-05:00

Read the full story at kuro5hin and at mindpixel's blog.

I wonder if they could record the cat's dreams too.

'The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games,' said the voice-over, 'in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks.'
-- William Gibson, Neuromancer - 1984

Reality Mining

2005-06-23T13:13:00.000-05:00

The Reality Mining experiment uses machine learning and mobile phones to model social networks.

Our research agenda takes advantage of the increasingly widespread use of mobile phones to provide insight into the dynamics of both individual and group behavior. By leveraging recent advances in machine learning we are building generative models that can be used to predict what a single user will do next, as well as model behavior of large organizations. . .

How do incoming students' social networks evolve over time?
How entropic (predictable) are most people's lives?
Can the topology of a social network be inferred from only proximity data?
How can we change a group's interactions to promote better functioning?

If you have a Symbian Series 60 Phone (such as the Nokia 6600) with a data plan, you can participate. Download the application here.

Evolving Computational Creatures

2005-06-23T12:54:00.000-05:00

Levitated is a great site of recreational computation, generative art, mathematics, and open source Flash projects.

Evolving Computational Creatures

"Even matter called inorganic, believed to be dead, responds to irritants and gives unmistakable evidence of a living principle within. Everything that exists, organic or inorganic, animated or inert, is susceptible to stimulus from the outside."
-- Nikola Tesla

How to Bend Spacetime

2005-06-17T07:23:00.000-05:00

John Walker, founder of Autodesk, shows how to bend spacetime and speculates, what if Archimedes had discovered universal gravitation before Newton.

Lifelike Robots Repliee Q1 and Q2

2005-06-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Lifelike female robots Repliee Q1 and Q2 probably won't be able to fool the Voight-Kampff empathy test machine from Blade Runner or the Turing test, but they do have lifelike soft silicone skin, and they are able to mimic human movements and gestures realistically.

See a video of Repilee Robots at Android Science

The Future of Mind and Body Enhancement

2005-06-14T11:46:00.000-05:00

Jamais Cascio at WorldChanging interviews Dr. James Hughes, Ramez Naam and Joel Garreau about the future of mind and body enhancement technology.

Dr. James Hughes: Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future
Ramez Naam: More Than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
Joel Garreau: Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- And What It Means To Be Human

Zombie Philosophy

2005-06-13T10:44:00.000-05:00

The philosophy of mind has been invaded by zombies.
Read about the undead in philosophy at Zombies Invade Philosophy!.

What is a zombie?

Zombie: A soulless body who has been revived from death and can be made to work as a slave. (Voodoo Information Pages: Glossary)

Zombie: A being that behaves like us and may share our functional organization and even, perhaps, our neurophysiological makeup without conscious experiences or qualia. (Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind)

qualia: The 'what it's like' character of mental states. The way it feels to have mental states such as pain, seeing red, smelling a rose, etc. (Dictionary of the Philosophy of Mind)

George A. Romero also has a new zombie movie coming out this Summer "Land of the Living Dead".

"Zombie Eat Brains" is a funny blog by Zombie Tom.
Also see his non-undead pop culture blog "Tom the Dog".

Sony Patents Brain Device

2005-06-13T09:43:00.000-05:00

The patent is really just a theory, using pulses of ultrasound to transmit data into the brain.

Could it also be used to transmit memories and behaviors like the plug-in personality modules "moddys" in George Alec Effinger's book "When Gravity Fails"?

"My name is Bond," said the guy. 'James Bond.' As if there could be any doubt."

"He's wearing a James Bond module. Thinks he's James Bond. He'll be pulling that trick all night, until someone raps him down and pops the moddy out of his head."

From When Gravity Fails, by George Alec Effinger.

Full Story on Patent

What is the ultimate mastermind diet?

2005-06-13T09:09:00.000-05:00

NewScientist.com has an article with 11 steps to improve your brain power. Eating a proper diet, exercise and getting plenty of sleep are common sense but there are some other interesting ideas for cognitive enhancement in the article.

"Working memory training could be the key to unlocking brain power"

Kryptos Puzzle

2005-06-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

There was an interesting story on NPR this morning about the unsolved fourth passage of the kryptos puzzle on a bronze sculpture at CIA headquarters.

The Encrypted Fourth Passage:

?OBKRUOXOGHULBSOLIFBBWFL
RVQQPRNGKSSOTWTQSJQSSEK
ZZWATJKLUDIAWINFBNYPVTTM
ZFPKWGDKZXTJCDIGKUHUAUEK
CAR

Frequently Asked Questions About Kryptos

Self Replicating Machines

2005-06-08T14:05:00.000-05:00

The RepRap project's goal is to create "a direct writing or rapid prototyping machine that can make a copy of itself, and make other products". These machines would be inexpensive and evolve as they reproduce.

Philosophical Games

2005-06-08T08:23:00.000-05:00

There are some cool interactive philosophical games at The Philosophers' Magazine. Are you living in a Matrix? How would you know? Find out by playing "Strange New World" based on ideas in the film The Matrix.

Electroluminescence Design

2005-06-07T08:50:00.000-05:00

Artist and designer Rachel Wingfield showcases some innovative uses for electroluminescence display technology at her website loop.pH.

'Digital Dawn', blinds that change luminosity in response to changes in ambient light.

'Temporal Light', tiles that that light up as you walk by.

Electroluminescence is an electrical phenomenon where a material emits light when an electric current is passed through it.

Supercomputer Brain Model

2005-06-07T07:54:00.000-05:00

In a project known as 'Blue Brain' scientists at IBM and EPFL will be using IBM's supercomputer 'Blue Gene' to model the wetware of the human brain.

From SciScoop story

Cheap Artificial Intelligence

2005-06-06T13:11:00.000-05:00

Radica Games makes a cool handheld version of 20Q.net "Twenty Questions, the neural-net on the Internet". The online version has been accumulating knowledge for 17 years by playing twenty questions with people.

When I played the online version, I thought of actress Angelina Jolie, and it guessed that I was thinking of "my soulmate".

West Indian Girl

2005-06-06T10:24:00.000-05:00

"West Indian Girl" was a type of designer LSD developed by Owsley in the 60's.
It's also the name of a great psychedelic pop band from California.
The song "What Are You Afraid Of" is being used in a television ad for Samsung cell phones.

West Indian Girl web site.

Rudy Rucker's new book

2005-06-06T09:49:00.000-05:00

A preview of Rudy Rucker's new book "The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul", "What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy".

Quote from "The Little Prince"

2005-06-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

"Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can
see rightly; What is essential is invisible to the eye."
-- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry