Naut's Thoughts

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Sunday, February 19, 2017

More on the AI debate, and beyond…IV

This will be the final part of Ball’s very interesting piece. The previous one ended like this: But Fisher realised that the nuclei of the atoms of different lithium isotopes can have different spins. This quantum property might affect the way lithium drugs act. For example, if lithium substitutes... Sign in to see full entry.

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Saturday, February 18, 2017

More on the AI debate, and beyond…III

To continue, this is how the previous post ended: However, Penrose is unmoved by those arguments and stands by the Orch-OR hypothesis. And despite Tegmark's prediction of ultra-fast decoherence in cells, other researchers have found evidence for quantum effects in living beings. Some argue that... Sign in to see full entry.

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Friday, February 17, 2017

More on the AI debate, and beyond…II

There are already questions arising from these posts, and there may be more; I shall address them to the best of my ability at the end of this brief series. Here is the last paragraph of the previous post: Whenever, in these experiments, we discover the path of a quantum particle, its cloud of... Sign in to see full entry.

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Thursday, February 16, 2017

More on the AI debate, and beyond…I

You may recall a few of my posts regarding the AI debate and Stephen Hawking’s suggestion it might ultimately spell the end of humanity. Others take the position that no matter how ‘smart’ AI might become, it will never match humans because it will never be truly ‘conscious’. Which of course raises... Sign in to see full entry.

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Wednesday, February 15, 2017

And more science…

For years now astronomers have been ‘hunting’ planets, especially earthlike ones. I remember an astronomer declaring years ago that the chance of finding many such planets was small – no so much because of our limited ability at the time, but because there simply couldn’t be very many, all things... Sign in to see full entry.

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Friday, February 10, 2017

More Science…

I can’t help it – when there’s too much political crap being flung around on all sides, (and I’m not only speaking of the US by any means), I tend to retreat to my own fields but also take an amateur’s excursion into physics and cosmology. On one of those occasions I encountered the following piece,... Sign in to see full entry.

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Thursday, February 9, 2017

A little bit of Science, anyone?

There is interesting stuff out there, and something new was discovered a few days ago – a White Dwarf Pulsar! White Dwarves are a dime a dozen – as far as I recall, the first one was discovered around the middle of the 19 th century. A WD is a relatively small star whose nuclear fuel is exhausted,... Sign in to see full entry.

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Monday, February 6, 2017

My Super Bowl ritual was a success...

I don't have to tell you about that amazing game - if you're interested at all you know everything about it, and probably even if you aren't... But I had promised to keep you posted about my game snacks, so here goes: After some agonizingly difficult decision-making process I finally settled on... Sign in to see full entry.

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Saturday, February 4, 2017

And here’s the latest from somewhere in space…

Stray black hole in Milky Way could be a cosmic bullet Think "Milky Way" and "black hole," and the supermassive pit of gravity at the center of our galaxy is bound to come to mind. But there are a collection of other rogue black holes wandering through our cosmic spiral neighborhood, and researchers... Sign in to see full entry.

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Friday, February 3, 2017

More on the preparations for the ritual…

Yesterday I posted a few ruminations about preparing for my annual ritual of watching the Super Bowl, which always involves the question: What do I nosh on? Watching football of any kind, even the Super Bowl, without something interesting to eat is unthinkable, at least for me. A few people here... Sign in to see full entry.

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