Experts: Man controlled robotic hand with thoughts

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And our android reality gets closer...

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assissi

shared by a very close friend to help me get through a hard time right now.

Prayer of Saint Francis of Assissi

Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace!

That where there is hatred, I may bring love.

That where there is wrong, I may bring the spirit of forgiveness.

That where there is discord, I may bring harmony.

That where there is error, I may bring truth.

That where there is doubt, I may bring faith.

That where there is despair, I may bring hope.

That where there are shadows, I may bring light.

That where there is sadness, I may bring joy.

Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort, than to be comforted.

To understand, than to be understood.

To love, than to be loved.

For it is by self-forgetting that one finds.

It is by forgiving that one is forgiven.

It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty: newyorker.com

an innocent man executed in texas. now what scalia?

Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty: newyorker.com

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Teen Drinkers Often Intend to Get Drunk, Survey Finds

seriously, money was spent on this study.

Teen Drinkers Often Intend to Get Drunk, Survey Finds

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robots learn to lie

granted, this probably didn't go beyond the scope of what they were programmed to do, but it's still freaky nonetheless.

10 robots were given points for how often they went for "food," a light-colored ring on the floor vs. "poison," a darker ring at the other end of the space. the robots had blue lights that went off randomly but gave away their position. there were only 8 spots near the food, so they had to compete for the spots. the robots who were the best at finding food went on to the next round. after 50 rounds, the robots started deceiving each other by not emitting their blue light so as not to give away their position when they were near food.

super fast robot hands

woody, my boyfriend, is quite impressed with the speed of these robot hands.

stephen hawking: "humans have entered a new stage of evolution"

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html

Although It has taken homo sapiens several million years to evolve from the apes, the useful information in our DNA, has probably changed by only a few million bits. So the rate of biological evolution in humans, Stephen Hawking points out in his Life in the Universe lecture, is about a bit a year.

"By contrast," Hawking says, "there are about 50,000 new books published in the English language each year, containing of the order of a hundred billion bits of information. Of course, the great majority of this information is garbage, and no use to any form of life. But, even so, the rate at which useful information can be added is millions, if not billions, higher than with DNA."

This means Hawking says that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information."

But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred.

"I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said.

In the last ten thousand years the human species has been in what Hawking calls, "an external transmission phase," where the internal record of information, handed down to succeeding generations in DNA, has not changed significantly. "But the external record, in books, and other long lasting forms of storage," Hawking says, "has grown enormously. Some people would use the term, evolution, only for the internally transmitted genetic material, and would object to it being applied to information handed down externally. But I think that is too narrow a view. We are more than just our genes."

The time scale for evolution, in the external transmission period, has collapsed to about 50 years, or less.

Meanwhile, Hawking observes, our human brains "with which we process this information have evolved only on the Darwinian time scale, of hundreds of thousands of years. This is beginning to cause problems. In the 18th century, there was said to be a man who had read every book written. But nowadays, if you read one book a day, it would take you about 15,000 years to read through the books in a national Library. By which time, many more books would have been written."

But we are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls "self designed evolution," in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. "At first," he continues "these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression."

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

Casey Kazan

Source: http://www.rationalvedanta.net/node/131

Po Man's Tao - A Ronin Philosopher: Metaphysically Wrinkle Free Peace Counselor

Po Man's Tao - A Ronin Philosopher: Metaphysically Wrinkle Free Peace Counselor

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love

watched house the other night. not a regular viewer, but will on occasion when i feel like vegging out and nothing else is on (that's what happens when you don't have cable). but i loved this exchange:

"he isn't in love with me, he just thinks he is." - female doctor

"it's the same thing." - house

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies - Science News | Science

Upcoming Military Robot Could Feed on Dead Bodies - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News - FOXNews.com

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Tendency Toward Complexity

i'm currently reading "shantaram," by gregory david roberts. it's a fascinating book about a fugitive's life in india, first living in a slum, then working with the mafia. however, there are many times in the book when he waxes philisophical and it just annoys me, usually because it's not quite how i view the world.

but in one conversation they discuss the meaning of the universe and how you define good and evil. i couldn't believe how much it seemed to sum up my thoughts these days about evolutionary extinction and how nothing in the universe is random. i will insert those passages here when i have time, but basically since the "big bang" the universe has been expanding and forming more complex, moving towards an order. it is the "tendency toward complexity," and maybe "god" is the ultimate complexity.

i haven't wrapped my mind yet around the good and evil aspect of it; that good is anything that helps the universe along toward the ultimate complexity, and evil is anything that holds it back.

i'm looking forward to exploring this further!

may 13th - my birthday!

haven't written in awhile so i thought i'd share about my birthday! other people with a may 13th birthday: stevie wonder, peter gabriel, robert pattinson (twilight), dennis rodman, george lucas, stephen colbert and bea arthur (RIP).

i was born in 1974, which means i'm 35 today! i've already had 2 small gatherings this past week to celebrate my birthday, so i'm taking it easy today. heading to the cinerama to see the new star trek for the matinee at 4pm - i know, i'm a dork.

last night i celebrated at my friend's new georgetown club, the tiger lounge.

another android article

people think i'm crazy when i say humans will all be androids someday, so i love to point out how we're already slowly becoming androids.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2008844993_eyecamera12.html

One-eyed filmmaker to shoot documentary with camera inside prosthetic eye
By Holly Fox
The Associated Press
BRUSSELS — A one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras.
Canadian Rob Spence's eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the disability into an advantage.
A fan of the 1970s television series "The Six Million Dollar Man," Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cellphone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.
With the camera tucked inside a prosthetic eye, he hopes to be able to record the same things he sees with his working eye, his muscles moving the camera eye just like his real one.
Spence said he plans to become a "human surveillance machine" to explore privacy issues and whether people are "sleepwalking into an Orwellian society."
He said his subjects won't know he's filming until afterward, but he will have to receive permission from them before including them in his film.
His special equipment will consist of a camera, originally designed for colonoscopies, a battery and a wireless transmitter. It's a challenge to get everything to fit inside the prosthetic eye, but Spence has had help from top engineers, including Steve Mann, who co-founded the wearable-computers research group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.
The camera was provided by Santa Clara, Calif.-based OmniVision, a company that specializes in the miniature cameras found in cellphones, laptops and endoscopes.
Zafer Zamboglu, staff technical-product manager at OmniVision, said he thinks that success with the eye camera will accelerate research into using the technology to restore vision to blind people.
"We believe there's a good future in the prosthetic eye," he said.
The team expects to get the camera to work in the next month. Spence, who jokingly calls himself "Eyeborg," told reporters at a media conference in Brussels that the camera hidden in a prosthetic eye — the same pale hazel color as his real one — would also let him capture more natural conversations than he would with a bulky regular camera.
"As a documentary maker, you're trying to make a connection with a person," he says, "and the best way to make a connection is through eye contact."
But Spence also acknowledged privacy concerns.
"The closer I get to putting this camera eye in, the more freaked out people are about me," he said. They aren't sure they want to hang around with someone who might be filming them at any time, he said.

personal robot

i just have to give a shout out to toys in babeland, a sex toy store. last fall on election day they gave away either a vibrator or a sleeve (the maverick, i believe) for free if you voted.

naturally, being one who loves free stuff, i went straight there on election day after spending the morning doing the "honk and wave" for my boss's re-election. i grabbed the silver bullet! changed my life... thanks toys in babeland!

another life taken by the DEA

a young man, only 24 years old, hung himself today in the spokane county jail after being arrested for smuggling pounds of marijuana into the U.S. by helicopter - arranged by the DEA! entrapment sickens me...

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2008806775_websuicide03m.html


Pot smuggling suspect hangs self in Spokane Jail
By The Associated Press
SPOKANE — Police say a Canadian man accused of smuggling marijuana by helicopter hanged himself in the Spokane County Jail.
The 24-year-old from Revelstoke, B.C., Samuel Jackson Lindsay-Brown, was alone in the cell where he was found Friday hanging by a bedsheet from a light fixture. Sgt. Joe Peterson told The Spokesman-Review police are investigating the death.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tom Rice says Lindsay-Brown had been charged with possession of a controlled substance with intent to deliver.
He was arrested Feb. 23 unloading 350 pounds of BC bud from a helicopter in a remote spot in the Colville National Forest. The delivery had been arranged by undercover Drug Enforcement Administration agents.

the military is starting to figure out that if they make fighting machines, they might turn around and want to destroy humans in general so they should probably keep that in mind from the start and have safeguards in place. well, duh.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,496309,00.html

Experts Warn of 'Terminator'-Style Military-Robot Rebellion

Friday , February 20, 2009

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code, or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.
The stark warning — which includes discussion of a "Terminator"-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters — is part of a hefty report funded by and prepared for the U.S. Navy's high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research.
The report, the first serious work of its kind on military robot ethics, envisages a fast-approaching era where robots are smart enough to make battlefield decisions that are at present the preserve of humans.
Eventually, it notes, robots could come to display significant cognitive advantages over Homo sapiens soldiers.
"There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do," Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. "Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when ... programs could be written and understood by a single person."
The reality, Dr. Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program.
Accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field — an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

i am back on my blog! i've been blogging on my myspace page, so i'm going to go back into the archive and transfer them here.

from the february 2009 issue of harper's magazine.

By chance, of course

By Wendell Berry. His essay “Faustian Economics”appeared in the May issue of Harper’s Magazine.
while attending the annual convocation of cause theorists and bigbangists at the local provincial research university, the mad farmer intercedes from the back row

“Chance” is a poor word among
the mazes of causes and effects, the last
stand of these all-explainers who,
backed up to the first and final Why,
reply, “By chance, of course!” As if
that tied up ignorance with a ribbon.
In the beginning something by chance
existed that would bang and by chance
it banged, obedient to the by-chance
previously existing laws of existence
and banging, from which the rest proceeds
by logic of cause and effect also
previously existing by chance? Well,
when all that happened who was there?
Did the chance that made the bang then make
the Bomb, and there was no choice, no help?
Prove to me that chance did ever
make a sycamore tree, a yellow-
throated warbler nesting and singing
high up among the white limbs
and the golden leaf-light, and a man
to love the tree, the bird, the song
his life long, and by his love to save
them, so far, from all the machines.
By chance? Prove it, then, and I
by chance will kiss your ass.

swarming

now back to my fascination with evolving ourselves into extinction...i heard an interesting show on kuow the other day about "swarming." (http://www.kuow.washington.edu/program.php?id=16513)they're researching swarming instincts and how to translate that into robots. seriously.
http://www.swarms.org/

Scalable sWarms of Autonomous Robots and Mobile Sensors (SWARMS) project. The SWARMS project brings together experts in artificial intelligence, control theory, robotics, systems engineering and biology with the goal of understanding swarming behaviors in nature and applications of biologically-inspired models of swarm behaviors to large networked groups of autonomous vehicles. Our main goal is to develop a framework and methodology for the analysis of swarming behavior in biology and the synthesis of bio-inspired swarming behavior for engineered systems. We will be interested in such questions as: Can large numbers of autonomously functioning vehicles be reliably deployed in the form of a “swarm” to carry out a prescribed mission and to respond as a group to high-level management commands? Can such a group successfully function in a potentially hostile environment, without a designated leader, with limited communications between its members, and/or with different and potentially dynamically changing “roles” for its members? What can we learn about how to organize these teams from biological groupings such as insect swarms, bird flocks, and fish schools? Is there a hierarchy of “compatible” models appropriate to swarming/schooling/flocking which is rich enough to explain these behaviors at various “resolutions” ranging from aggregate characterizations of emergent behavior to detailed descriptions which model individual vehicle dynamics?
Vijay KumarUniversity of Pennsylvania.

U-District needle exchange to add access to anti-overdose drug

new article about the U-District needle exchange run by the People's Harm Reduction Alliance, of which i'm on the board of directors.

http://dailyuw.com/2009/1/14/u-district-needle-exchange-add-access-anti-overdos/

Post Prison Education Program - Teaching ExConvicts

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AT4gK0TSMV4

this is a very important program!