Breeding The Perfect Spammer

From a really interesting article about Craigslist and its enigmatic founder, comes this account of the maddening lengths to which spammers go to keep the site filled with spam: Captchas—distorted words that can be interpreted by humans more easily than by machines—tamed spam on craigslist for a while. Then it came back full force, not [...]

Brain Powering

via Daniel Florien comes this fascinating account of the human brain and the energy required to run it: According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a [...]

YouTube As Naturally Evolving The Future Of Television And How Google Benefits Off Of YouTube

Neat video on how YouTube puts out so much material that we can discover what people actually will choose among a myriad of options and model TV off of it and then on the reach of Google and YouTube’s role in that: Your Thoughts?

Getting Meat Without Killing Animals

The idea of being able to eat delicious meat without it coming at the expense of poor abused animals is just too good to be true.  Here’s hoping this kind of thing really is our future: A controversial cooker that ‘grows’ meat and fish by heating animal cells in your kitchen claimed first prize in [...]

On Meeting People Where They Are

While he was hospitalized a couple years ago, Daniel Dennett got irritated when people offered to pray for him and insisted that they thank doctors rather than offer their ineffectual prayers.  The Wittenburg Door was appalled and inferred (quite unjustifiably) that Dennett did not understand that all many people mean to say when they say [...]

Memory, Concentration, and Distraction

From MedicalNewsToday: Principal investigator Edward K. Vogel, a UO professor of psychology, compares working memory to a computer’s random-access memory (RAM) rather than the hard drive’s size — the higher the RAM, the better processing abilities. With more RAM, he said, students were better able to ignore distractions people who hold their focus more intensely [...]

Daily Hilarity: Wait Time Estimates

This xkcd cartoon made me laugh pretty hard:

Were The 20th Century Wars A Rebuke To Reason?

City of God argues that the New Atheists need to learn from history that reason is no guide to world-improvement If religion had motivated people to die for God and King, surely reason and science had made the dying that much nastier through the innovations of gas, flame-throwers, bomber aircraft, bigger artillery and the like. [...]

Some Qualifications Of My Suggestion For Moving Philosophy Debates To The Internet

I appreciate Professor Harman’s willingness to exchange a couple rounds of debate with me across blogs against his stated desire to avoid such exchanges and so I will remain grateful to him even if we do not hear further reply from him.  Here are his reasons for rejecting my notion of having a centralized message [...]

On The Pros And Cons Of Blogging As A Preferred Medium For Philosophy

Graham Harman has an excellent (and lightning quickly delivered) reply up in response to my remarks earlier on the profession of philosophy looking into blogging as a preferred medium for more efficient and multi-vocal exchange.  I’m quite grateful and want to address a few of his key observations and expand on some of my own [...]

The Future Of Philosophy Publishing

Fascinating speculations from Graham Harman: Until very recently, the mere act of getting a book published was difficult enough that it carried a certain automatic prestige, provided that you weren’t publishing with some obvious fly-by-night sort of firm or a known vanity press. But of course there was and is still a certain hierarchy among [...]

Where Crayons Come From

Stem-Cells Reversing Blindness

Amazing: Thanks to Unreasonable Faith and Gizmodo

Insect Cyborgs

The military is developing technology that, when surgically implanted into an insect, would allow us to control its flight: Instead of attempting to create miniature robots as spies, researchers are now experimenting with developing insect cyborgs or “cybugs” that could work even better. So far scientists can already control the flight of moths using implanted [...]

Buying A Twitter Following

Turns out that if you can’t get people interested in your Twitter updates, you can always get a 1000 followers for $87.  Essentially it looks like a way to turn Twitter into yet another opportunity to send you junk mail from advertisers.  (In addition to their attempt to destroy the entire point of Digg and [...]