Lone Gunman

daily dose of imagery is a sim­ple view of my day to day visual expe­ri­ence, or my per­sonal pho­to­blog.
I post one photo a day on this web site.

By Sam Javan­rouh. The newest addi­tion to my RSS reader.

I’ve loved sushi for as long as I can remem­ber, and since I read Carl’s Sushi: A Lay­ered Tech­nol­ogy a few years ago, I’ve also loved mak­ing my own sushi — improv­ing and get­ting more adven­tur­ous every time.

On the left, please see my next attempt: Shikai Maki, as demon­strated by myamii over at For the Love of Food. I’m both ner­vous and excited.

This is what started it all. By bring­ing some inter­est­ing philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions to the table, this dis­cus­sion got me seri­ously think­ing about what impact not fol­low­ing a struc­tured and con­tin­u­ous per­sonal and pro­fes­sional devel­op­ment plan can have on both my qual­ity of life and that of the world directly around me.

The FAQ on the Mean­ing of Life is an inter­est­ing con­cept and con­tains ideas from many diverse schools of thought. How­ever, it’s not writ­ten for a wide audi­ence: a sci­ence back­ground — and specif­i­cally, one in com­put­ing — is ben­e­fi­cial, pos­si­bly required, to under­stand the con­cepts discussed.

So what is The Mean­ing of Life? I won’t spoil it, but suf­fice to say that it’s not actu­ally 42, and the Tech­no­log­i­cal Sin­gu­lar­ity will be the key moment in the evo­lu­tion of our world.

Lam­bast­ing nan­otech­nol­ogy and advo­cat­ing intel­li­gence enhance­ment through an increase in research of both Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence and Tran­shu­man­ism, it’s an inter­est­ing and thought-provoking read whether you believe none of the con­clu­sions, some of them, or believe it devoutly…

If we could recon­fig­ure our neu­rons and upgrade the sig­nal prop­a­ga­tion speed to around, say, a third of the speed of light, or 100,000,000 meters per sec­ond, the result would be a factor-of-one-million speedup in thought. At this rate, one sub­jec­tive year would pass every 31 phys­i­cal seconds.

The FAQ raises some inter­est­ing ques­tions and will make you ques­tion — if only for a moment — where you’re going wrong (if you are at all) and what you can improve (if any­thing). The most impor­tant thing is that it makes you think.

Dunkin’ Donuts removes ‘ter­ror scarf’ ad — The US chain Dunkin’ Donuts has pulled an advert fol­low­ing com­plaints that the scarf worn by a celebrity chef offered sym­bolic sup­port for Islamic extremism.

She was wear­ing a black-and-white checked scarf around her neck that resem­bled a tra­di­tional Arab keffiyeh.

This fash­ion choice incensed at least one promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive blog­ger, who said it evoked extrem­ist videos.

The blog­ger called the gar­ment “a reg­u­lar adorn­ment of Mus­lim ter­ror­ists appear­ing in behead­ing and hostage-taking videos”.

Peo­ple really do need to get more edu­cated on these issues. Do the major­ity of peo­ple not realise that there is a dif­fer­ence between Arabs and Mus­lims — let alone Mus­lims and extremists?

As a white mid­dle classer who has recently decided to learn Ara­bic, I get a lot of odd, angry stares when I (attempt to) talk to the local Arab immi­grants. How­ever, I just ignore these igno­rant peo­ple… just like Dunkin’ Donuts should have.

Edit: Here is the blog post from said “promi­nent con­ser­v­a­tive blog­ger”. Watch out, it’s scary over there!

Soon it’s going to be ille­gal to see into the future; con­tact the deceased; and find out what’s inside closed envelopes. Well, probably…

New laws are about to crim­i­nalise clair­voy­ants who fail to note on their adver­tise­ments that their ser­vices ‘are not sub­ject to sci­en­tific proof’.

Obvi­ously, I’d like to think that the more intel­li­gent among us realise that most of this “clair­voy­ance” is just a com­bi­na­tion of Forer effects, con­fir­ma­tion bias and self-delusion, but I’m a pos­i­tivist.

I can’t wait to see my first case:

“Madame Arcati, you have been con­victed of prey­ing upon stu­pid and gullible peo­ple by pur­port­ing to see into the future, and to com­mu­ni­cate with the dead, with­out warn­ing them in writ­ing that your art is tosh”.
“But Sir, that’s what we of the spir­i­tual trade have been doing for cen­turies. Surely the stu­pid and gullible should be allowed their illu­sions?“
“And another thing, Sir: If I am to be pun­ished for this, what about the Vicar? He can’t prove his claims any more then poor lit­tle I can. What about wrin­kle cream makers?”

This has also been in the news pre­vi­ously. I do won­der, though, if it will be stretched to cover the many instances of pop­u­lar pseu­do­science.

via The Magistrate’s Blog