speaking evolution

I still really like the idea that ..

if I say out loud, my mother's mother's mother's mother's.... and keep going non-stop for about a 1000 years - I'll eventually be speaking about amoebae

----------------------

at 3 mother's per second

--------------------------

it's a 1000 years to amoebae, and a 100 000 years to bacteria

--------------------------

Btw, if you too are doubting the scale of that 1000 year estimate, its not just an exaggeration. I'm using a conservative estimate of 10^11 (100000000000) generations between me and my amoebae ancestors - based on very small times between generations for the first 400 million years of animal life. A number so mind-bending in size, that it will take 1000 years to count to at 3 times a second

slow burning fuse (?)

got it here : https://www.facebook.com/TheSlowBurningFuse

those aliens again

So I know most of you don't need to hear this (?) 
but even though alien life, in even just the observable universe alone, is a mathematical certainty, the chances of us sharing the same bit of space-time and therefore being able to meet any aliens, might very well be extremely (maybe even impossibly) low.

----

Especially if Einstein's cosmic speed limit holds - and there's no indication that it won't.

anarchy too, must be built

building intelligence

Jeff Hawkins again, this time in a googtechtalk. 1hr.  

Like in his earlier videos and book, he gives the best explanation of the neocortex i've heard so far --the neocortex is a hierarchical temporal memory system, implemented as a sparse distributed representation.

See earlier posts on this:
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2012/10/grokking-htm-for-ai.html
http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2007/07/intelligence-is-prediction.html

property should come with a warning

WARNING: The accumulation of property, wealth, and general luxury, has been known to (frequently) cause severely negative changes in ideology.

scared into fascism

Is the fear of new threats, that might be introduced by upcoming technological revolutions, being used to argue for this trend to fascism and anti-privacy we're seeing such a drastic increase in? ..

..like the possible large scale threats that single individuals might present in a world with both synthetic biology and a free and open internet ...

if so, how do we argue otherwise?

and still never meet the neighbours

Recent results from the Kepler space telescope and studies of nearby solar-mass stars, suggest that nearly one in four stars like the sun could have Earth-size planets.

That's anything between 10-100 billion earth-like planets in our Milky Way
The Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years in diameter.

That's big enough, so that even with 100 billion earth-like planets,
and a reasonable percentage of them producing life,
and a percentage of those producing intelligent life,
and a percentage of those surviving for long enough to explore space ...
It's still possible to never, ever, meet the neighbours!
:(

natural selection at the largest scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Smolin#Fecund_universes

Evolution / Natural Selection at the largest scale we could possibly ever know about - and the idea might of course be forever non-testable.

There's an earlier post on this here - http://jaysenn.blogspot.com/2006/10/natural-selection-of-universes.html

our tools are broken

Regular Reminder: Social networking tools and other information infrastructure that is not owned by us (copylefted) is almost by definition, fundamentally broken - because anything less, severely limits the extent to which we can use, experiment, and grow these into useful universal assets .. esp true in the long term.

the list of our broken tools include facebook, google search, and the operating systems windows, mac-osx, ios, and bits of android. (linux is completely ours)