Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
— Bruce Lee
Gärdenfors has a book “Conceptual Spaces” which I haven’t got around to reading yet (it’s not on the ultrapriority queue, only on the normal priority queue ) The blog entry below has a few links to the central concepts of Gärdenfors’ theory. I agree with the need for integrating different levels (symbolic, connectionist and spatial [...]
Wow: if you are at all interested in physics, check out this resource – seminars recorded for public viewing by the Perimeter Institute, referenced in arxiv style. You will find tons of interesting stuff there: PIRSA – Perimeter Institute Recorded Seminar Archive Technorati Tags: physics, pointer
A very moving and sad story. Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened? Technorati Tags: people
This incident shows how “naive” philosophers put forth arguments for undermining this fragile project of science (=trying to make humans listen to reason). (I refer to the Pope’s quotation of Feyerabend, not that he is not allowed to speak at the university). Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog: Pope Quotes Feyerabend, and Gets in Big Trouble [...]
One of the most interesting topics in the philosophy of mathematics is the Axiom of Choice. Here is a nice page with a little intro to the topic and also lots of links for further reading. For the philosophical relevancy, this quote is a nice demonstration: Jerry Bona once said, The Axiom of Choice is [...]
NASA has some multimedia files from the Cassinin-Huygens probe. Listen to Saturn’s radio emissiones, they are beautiful and alien – an example of how different the universe can be from that what we find here on Earth. Cassini-Huygens: Multimedia-Images Technorati Tags: pointer
In the same vein as the post before, some argumentative help when confronted with science doubters. Eliezer rightly points to the problem lying behind calling science into question: it is not suggestive of an overly critical mind – quite the contrary – it is indicative of a mind in search of truth proclaimed by an [...]
Isaac Asimov is one of my favourite science fiction authors. In this article he has a nice quote I would like to share: …when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just [...]
Bee at backreaction has a long post about the world’s current problem. Backreaction: On The Edge I didn’t read the whole post, but the quote below resounded with me because this is also what troubles me deeply: Intelligence is no longer an evolutionary advantage if the content of thought becomes increasingly abstract and theoretical. Our [...]
Edge.org questioned science celebrities (sorry, could not resist on what they changed their mind about. Sir Martin Rees talks about posthumanism (that what comes after transhumanism Rees: We Should Take the ‘Posthuman’ Era Seriously Public discourse on very long-term planning is riddled with inconsistencies. Mostly we discount the future very heavily Indeed – the source [...]
