Part two in my response to this. The section of the speech on nuclear winter is the most convincing part of the argument. It is also involves a particular piece of history that I don’t know very well, so I am forced to take Michael Crichton’s retelling of the facts at face value. Even in [...]
The first part of my response to this. When did “skeptic” become a dirty word in science? When did a skeptic require quotation marks around it? I’m going to interpret this rhetorical question as an invitation to skepticism. Let’s first consider the argument against SETI. I’m going to cut through directly to the punchline. The [...]
My Dad sent me the following link to a speech by Michael Crichton on the commingling of science and politics: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-alienscauseglobalwarming.html. It is a well crafted speech that contains many arguments worth considering. I’m going to spend a couple of posts eviscerating those arguments. Stay tuned.
Ever wonder what it’s like to visit Antarctica? A colleague of mine is doing just that. You can follow along on her blog. Check out the research project she’s working on here. There’s even a TED talk.
I suppose I don’t think I’ve come as far in the past year as I wanted to, and in particular the last few months. Perhaps because the rest of my life has worked out so profoundly well, I end up focusing the vagaries of my professional (and really academic) life. Am I producing new knowledge? [...]
Though my argument that the reward interpretation of a signal is always internal to an agent still holds, Ana pointed out that the existance of the signal could be either external or internal. A reasonable distinction based on the source of the signal could differentiate between external and internal reward.
I’ve signed up with researchblogging.org. This should provide some visibility for posts concerning current and past research in AI and robotics, and thus provide some incentive for me to write them. Regular blogging will continue as scheduled.
A talk on why beauty is such a good selection criteria for discovering correct physical law. A quote: Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. I will say that mathematical beauty is in part self fulfilling, since theories which are beautiful (simple) are more likely to be discovered before grossly [...]
That’s nice, but where’s all that hydrogen going to come from? Your cousin Howard might be right after all.
Every so often I come across conspiracies relating to 9-11. Example. For some reason I found these theories deeply disturbing, especially considering the quality of evidence in the accepted narrative. Then I remembered that some people have an innate inability to understand complexity, and I started feeling better. UPDATE: I’ve been taken to task (rightly [...]