Hayek: May 8, 1899 – March 23, 1992
Oops, forgot to publish this two days ago!
Oops, forgot to publish this two days ago!
Ray Kurzweil’s article from last year’s Scientific American special on robotics is reprinted again here.
I see that Martha Nussbaum is weighing in on the liberal education debate. The debate, crudely put, asks whether education should be instrumental – i.e. merely training up students to serve an economic imperative – or is there another deeper aspect to education, an intrinsic aspect, that inducts students into the postulates of our and…
I was reminded of one of the great characters of 20th Century British philosophy – C.E.M. Joad. The Wikipedia entry is impoverished: if you really want a nicely written and informed piece on Joad, you should check out my chum Geoffrey Thomas’ 44 page booklet Cyril Joad published by Birkbeck College (ISBN 090790419X). Geoff won…
Here’s an introduction to swarm intelligence featuring Christian Jacob – one a podcast from CBC Radio 1; the other a video from the Discovery Channel. Another string to Jacob’s bow is his swarm artwork.
With the complete digitization of Time Magazine’s archives I was able to find what must rank as Oakeshott’s highest profile and amusing press splash – Knowledge v. Pet Ideas – and this well before the essays collected under the banner of Rationalism in Politics. I love the footnote: Among Oakeshott’s publications is a treatise entitled A Guide to…
Swarm is a composite being of hundreds of thousands of bees driven by a human intelligence. Swarm is technically intangible, as his body is merely an aggregate of tiny forms, and he can fly through the air or assume any shape and size he desires. Swarm can also mentally influence the actions of other bees,…
Marco Lacoboni lectures on the phenomenon of Mirror Neurons, possibly the hottest topic in cognitive science these days. Unfortunately some of the illustrations from his talk have been cut. (Check out Larry Shapiro’s paper on the topic here)
Courtesy of Ginger Campbell’s excellent Brain Science Podcast website here is an interview with Pat Churchland (the interview begins after some preliminaries, so please be patient). An excellent idea is the inclusion of the interview transcript. I look forward to listening to the many other interviews. A great resource!
Here is a nice collection of HD photographs of a plethora of robots from Boston.com. The diversity of uses is astonishing – from the banal to the exotic – they are ubiquitous. But let’s not get carried away and talk of consciousness.