Robot drummer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddQjDei2zbYBad physicists, or bad reporters? You decide: "Time Travellers from the future 'could be here in weeks'":
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/02/06/scitime106.xmlhttp://www.newscientist.com/channel/opinion/mg19726425.800-comment-is-big-physics-peddling-science-pornography.html(wow, when even NewScientist admits this is going on, you know it's
really bad! Usually they are the first ones to jump on the train of promoting any physicist who makes some whacky comment that nobody else agrees with.)
"Jawbone Eliminates Noise" ad (can someone explain what the 2 men making out has to do with the rest of the ad? Wow, and I thought only
lesbian homoeroticism sells products... we are truly progressing as a society!):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sPQAgRSydUFake site on adopting kids for their organs... quite humorous, yet disturbing:
http://www.medicaladoptions.com/http://www.medicaladoptions.com/childrens_profiles.htmlCharlie Stross "Top 10 Things Environmentalists Need to Learn"... a subject I don't know much about, but everything he says sounds quite reasonable to me:
http://depletedcranium.com/?p=368A Deep Dive Into the Mandelbrot Set -- A Mandelbrot Set the size of the known universe, zoomed all the way into the size of a single computer screen:
(if there is anyone out there who still thinks that mathematics is invented rather than discovered and explored, please watch this video which is a graph of the equation Z
n+1 = Z
n^2 + C... guaranteed to change your mind or your money back!)
(thanks to
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flamingnerd for bringing this video to my attention)
I used to spend hours and hours writing and rewriting the most efficient assembly code arbitrary-precision floating point routines I could come up with on my 486 to zoom into the Mandelbrot set when I was in high school, but I never came anywhere near to being able to zoom in as far as they do here... of course, personal computers now have thousands of times more computational power since then :)
Cute video of a furry dancing to Dr. Who remix of Eurhythmics song with an Ipod:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrNWp5d0GQoThe Bogdanov Equation, a book that Lubos Motl has announced he's writing that I'll be eager to read when it comes out:
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/01/lequation-bogdanov.htmlhttp://www.amazon.fr/Bogdanov-Affair-Lubos-Motl/dp/2750903866(assuming it gets translated into English) For those unfamiliar with the Bogdanov brothers, they are twin brothers from France who published a series of papers which are widely viewed as having only been published by a glitch in the system, similar to the Sokal affair (indeed, it's usually referred to as the
Bogdanov Affair). While some refer to it as a hoax, the brothers themselves say that it was an honest attempt at solving problems in physics and Lubos defends their ideas as being valuable, at least more valuable than loop quantum gravity research such as the kind advocated by Lee Smolin. Without taking sides (but leaning towards believing the majority/establishment over Lubos), I find the whole thing fascinating and would like to read the book to hear more about what Lubos has to say regarding their ideas and regarding science in general.
Dean Radin, 4 time former President of the "Parapsychological Association" dupes Google into letting him give a lecture on his crackpot ESP research:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qw_O9QiwqewSeveral of us got into a debate about this video on sifter... with
simonfunk and others (who are usually quite sensible/skeptical) supporting Dean Radin's claim that there is a "taboo" in science against "psi" research (where psi is the latest euphemism for paranormal activity/abilities, telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, telekinesis, etc.)... against myself and a few others who firmly reject Radin's claim on the basis that what he's calling a "taboo" is not a taboo at all--it's just a result of scientists having overwhelming evidence that these phenomena are impossible (coupled with the knowledge that the entire history of such "research" has been one long series of fraud, hoaxes, and incompetent researchers). My opinion is that the people who work on Psi are foolish crackpots at best but more likely dishonest deceivers seeking attention. And yet I find it very intriguing that he can manage to disarm skeptics and almost manages to pass himself off as a real scientist, even to educated technologically literate audiences like Google. If nothing else, I find the video very interesting from a sociological standpoint: how do you impersonate a scientist be emulating their methods, mode of speech, and behavior, while continuing to work on bogus stuff that has already been thoroughly discredited by science? I must admit he does a much better job of it than the intelligent design pseudoscientists. Watching it has also made me want to go back and watch Ghostbusters again. If only I'd known when it came out that there are actual people out there who think they are the
real Ghostbusters!
XKCD's humorous depiction of the "overwhelming evidence" mentioned above:
http://xkcd.com/373/Interview with Rodney Brooks and others on the future of AI&robots:
http://www.wfs.org/Dec-janfiles/AIInt.htmBrooks: "If you went back to 1985 and you told people they would have lots of computers in their houses, they would have thought that was crazy. Where would we put those big boxes with the spinning discs? That was the conception of computers at that time. I think what people are going to see in their houses in fifteen or twenty years are robots, many robots. There's already more than two million people in the U.S. that have cleaning robots...."
Barack Obama's speech/interview at Google (yes, I voted for him on Tuesday... after changing my party from Libertarian to Decline to State on the last possible day):
http://youtube.com/watch?v=m4yVlPqeZwoRecently on the SL4 mailing list, Eliezer made the following pessimistic but humorous comment:
"I keep wondering if I should buy Hillary for the Democratic
nomination, or sell Obama as president, on the theory that no one who
knows what a bubble sort is will ever be allowed to occupy the Oval
Office." - Eliezer Yudkowsky
(watch Google video above to see Obama's spontaneous reference to Bubble sort)
Papers on psi and the 1995 US government's review of the CIA's Stargate program:
http://anson.ucdavis.edu/~utts/psipapers.html(I read some of these after watching the Dean Radin video, out of curiosity. I had heard that the Soviet Union had employed self-proclaimed "psychics" at some point, but I had no idea that the CIA had a program called Stargate that was very similar! And as recently as 1995... very interesting.)
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