November 2012 Archives

Spaun, which stands for Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, has 2.5 million simulated neurons organized into subsystems to resemble the prefrontal cortex, basil ganglia, thalamus and other cognitive machinery in the brain. It also has a simulated eye that can see, and an arm that draws.

Spaun can recognize numbers, remember lists and write them down. It even passes some basic aspects of an IQ test, the team reports in the journal Science.

The simplified model of the brain, which took a year to build, captures many aspects of neuroanatomy, neurophysiology and psychological behaviour, says Eliasmith, director of Waterloo's Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience.

English: A map of the Boötes void. Credits: Powell, Richard. Atlas of the Universe Copyrights information: atlasoftheuniverse.com/copyright (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Boötes void or the Great Void is a huge and approximately spherically shaped region of space, containing very few galaxies.  At nearly 250 million light-years in diameter 

(approximately 0.27% of the diameter of the visible universe), or nearly 236,000 Mpc³ in volume, the Boötes void is one of the largest known voids in the universe, and is referred to as a supervoid. The center of the Boötes void is approximately 700 million light years from Earth. According to astronomer Greg Aldering, the scale of the void is such that "If the Milky Way had been in the center of the Boötes void, we wouldn't have known there were other galaxies until the 1960s."

[...] the zookeepers 

Ota Benga, at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, showing his sharpened teeth. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

convinced Benga [one of the Congolese tribe of Mbuti pygmies] to play with the orangutan in its cage. Benga obliged. Crowds gathered to watch the two monkeying around. The keepers gave Benga his bow and arrow; he shot targets, squirrels, the occasional rat. Bones were scattered about the cage to add a whiff of cannibalism. The keepers goaded Benga to occasionally charge the bars of his enclosure, baring his sharp teeth. Children screamed. Adults were at turns horrified and titillated. "Is that a man?" a visitor asked. A circus owner offered to throw a party for Benga, a French spinster offered to purchase him, and a black manicurist offered to paint his nails. Hornaday posted a sign outside of the cage, displaying Benga's height, weight, and how he was acquired. "Exhibited each afternoon during September," it concluded.

A Saudi woman. (Photo credit: Retlaw Snellac)

RIYADH -- Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

Since last week, Saudi women's male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together.

A centre for 'terminator studies', where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University. 

Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no connection between lunar phases and the incidence of psychological problems. This is the conclusion reached by a team of researchers directed by Professor Geneviève Belleville of Université Laval's School of Psychology after having examined the relationship between the moon's phases and the number of patients who show up at hospital emergency rooms experiencing psychological problems.

A South Pacific island, shown on marine charts and world maps as well as on Google Earth and Google Maps, does not exist, Australian scientists say.

The supposedly sizeable strip of land, named Sandy Island on Google maps, was positioned midway between Australia and French-governed New Caledonia.

But when scientists from the University of Sydney went to the area, they found only the blue ocean of the Coral Sea.

The phantom island has featured in publications for at least a decade.

The Kowloon Walled City was something straight out of dystopian fiction - but it was very much factual for the 33,000 people who lived there. Kowloon, as Wikipedia succinctly puts it, was a "densely populated, largely ungoverned settlement in Kowloon, Hong Kong." In fact, the 6.5-acre 

English: Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, photographed from an airplane Deutsch: Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong, Luftbild (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

enclave was the most densely populated space on earth: approximately 1,255,000 inhabitants per square kilometer! For comparison, Wikipedia points out that "Hong Kong as a whole (itself one of the most densely populated areas on earth) had a population density of about 6,700 inhabitants per square kilometer." The settlement dates back to AD 960, but its namesake walls were built by the Chinese in 1847, after the British took control of Hong Kong proper. Following Japan's surrender at the end of World War II, the Chinese reclaimed Kowloon and opened it to refugees; it was then that its population dramatically increased. The Walled City was ultimately cleared and demolished in 1994. 

I lived in KWC when I was 2-3 years old but I have no recollection of that time. Later on, even though our family moved out of there, but since I was enrolled in the schools near there and my parent worked during the day, so my bro and me were dropped off at my relative's place in KWC everyday. I got to know the place pretty well because I spent at least 4 hrs there everyday from 1984 to 1991. So ask away!

If our current level of organization, having many self-aware entities, is a result of a random fluctuation, it is much less likely than a level of organization which only creates stand-alone self-aware entities. For every universe with the level of organization we see, there should be an enormous number of lone Boltzmann brains floating around in unorganized environments. In an infinite universe, the number of self-aware brains that spontaneously randomly form out of the chaos, complete with false memories of a life like ours, should vastly outnumber the real brains evolved from an inconceivably rare local fluctuation the size of the observable universe.