Cool Stuff
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.
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 [...]
Just saw this on Slashdot. Clicking through to the press release reveals: A123Systems and Cobasys Partnership to Supply General Motors with Lithium Ion Battery for its Plug- in Hybrid Development Program Cobasys Partnership is of course the same Cobasys Partnership that supplied Li Ion batteries for the original EV1. Incidently, Cobasys is now wholly owned [...]
So I watched Who Killed the Electric Car? last night. Of course, one can only assume “plug in” hybrids will eventually fill the same niche as electric cars. Plug-in, that is, until you realize that to buy the batteries necessary to run an electric car, you have to go to Texaco shell company. Hmm. And [...]