Hello Susie, I am the Last Moment Robot. I am here to help you and guide you through your last moment on earth. i am sorry that [pause] your family and friends can’t be with you right now, but don’t be afraid. I am here to comfort you. [pause] You are not alone, you are with me. [pause] Your family and friends love you very much, they will remember you after you are gone. [pause] Time of death 11:56 More: http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/7/3069974/last-moment-robot-dan-chen-video via +Peter Asaro http://youtu.be/T8PNzA2S6EY

Gunther Cox originally shared this post: What Happens When You Load a Web Page?

John Baez originally shared this post: My last post showed a video of a ‘multi-scale Turing pattern’ which creates patterns that look biological. But it had perfect 3-fold symmetry artificially imposed on it, which is a bit of a cheat. Nature builds symmetrical patterns in some more subtle way – ‘imperfect’ but robust. So until we figure that out, I like this asymmetrical example better. W. Blut wrote: “It’s been more than two years since I came across his [Jonathan McCabe’s] multi-scale Turing pat­terns. They instantly intrigued me. And although I could recre­ate the gist of his images, I could never over­come the prac­ti­cal problems. In fact, the code proved haz­ardous to the elderly, infants and pregnant women. I thought my lack of numer­i­cal skill in tack­ling the huge equa­tions I ran into was the prob­lem. It was pon­der­ously slow and I suspected Jonathan had a secret lair packed with supercomputers.” “Turns out I was being silly. An almost inci­den­tal post on Flickr revealed that Jonathan has a paper on his cyclic sym­met­ric multi-scale Turing patt.., what the hell, on his McCabeisms. And it’s full of DTC lines (a rarely needed acronym for “damn that’s clever”). Seems I wasn’t bark­ing up the wrong tree, I was in the wrong for­est, on the wrong con­ti­nent, on the wrong planet… As if that wasn’t enough, Jason Rampe pro­vides a blog post with use­ful point­ers in imple­ment­ing Jonathan’s idea. I say point­ers, it’s actu­ally more of a very elab­o­rate pseudocode than a blog post. So the McCabeism is out there, ready to be imple­mented by anyone.” “So I did, […] and thanks to Jason, it only took a few hours.” All the references can be found here: http://www.wblut.com/2011/07/13/mccabeism-turning-noise-into-a-thing-of-beauty/

Live Streaming and Gamifying Education In addition to +Fraser Cain and +Pamela Gay‘s brilliant Astronomy Hangouts, one other vibrant community of streamers has heavily influenced my thinking about the medium: the Starcraft 2 streaming community. Although the community has significant presences across the internet (especially on Reddit and Twitter), the heart of the community is on the Team Liquid forums. If you aren’t familiar, hit up the link and let me introduce you to the community. At the time of my posting, there are 95 live streamers reaching an audience of roughly 16,000 viewers. This is near midnight on an average Wednesday; during major tournaments or other community events, audiences will easily clock in over 100,000 viewers. And the community is attracting advertising dollars in proportion to the attention it attracts. Starcraft is one of a number of games streamed regularly on services like Twitch.tv, which hosts streams to thousands of viewers daily. http://www.twitch.tv/directory But the Team Liquid forums cater to the SC2 community directly, and have generated quite a sophisticated culture and economy surrounding their gaming. http://www.teamliquid.net/video/streams/ At top of this list are a number of features streams. Some featured streams are highly produced tournaments; right now, the IGN Pro League is streaming their tournament, complete with casting and commentary, studio productions, and commercial sponsorship. This produced content is usually broadcast several times during the day. Other featured streams are professional Starcraft players live streaming their own online play. Individual streamers are also usually sponsored and run their own advertisements (either on screen logos during the game, or full screen commercials between games), and are paid in proportion to their viewership. Some pros, like Destiny, support themselves entirely through their streaming. http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/g7q91/iam_destiny_i_quit_my_job_to_play_starcraft_2_for/ The really interesting thing for me, however, is the other live streams, the “long tail” of the […]

John Baez originally shared this post: How much a message tells you depends on what you were expecting. We can understand this very precisely using the concept of ‘relative information’. Today I’ll explain this and give an incredibly cool application to biology. Suppose a population of organisms has an evolutionarily stable state. Then as time passes, the information in this stable state relative to its current state always decreases! In short: the population keeps learning through natural selection, so it has less ‘left to learn’. (This is a theorem proved by +Marc Harper and others. Like all theorems, it has assumptions… and these assumptions don’t fit nicely into a G+ post. So please read the blog article before you argue.) Information Geometry (Part 11) Last time we saw that given a bunch of different species of self-replicating entities, the entropy of their population distribution can go either up or down as time passes. This is true even in the……

Objectification The following are philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s criteria for objectification, that is, the act of treating a person as an object: instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for the objectifier’s purposes; denial of autonomy: the treatment of a person as lacking in autonomy and self-determination; inertness: the treatment of a person as lacking in agency, and perhaps also in activity; fungibility: the treatment of a person as interchangeable with other objects; violability: the treatment of a person as lacking in boundary-integrity; ownership: the treatment of a person as something that is owned by another (can be bought or sold); denial of subjectivity: the treatment of a person as something whose experiences and feelings (if any) need not be taken into account. To which Professor Rae Langton, MIT, adds the following: reduction to body: the treatment of a person as identified with their body, or body parts; reduction to appearance: the treatment of a person primarily in terms of how they look, or how they appear to the senses; silencing: the treatment of a person as if they are silent, lacking the capacity to speak. Colin Mackay originally shared this post: What is objectification, anyway? The following are philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s criteria for objectification, that is, the act of treating a person as an object: instrumentality: the treatment of a person as a tool for th…

Cliff Harvey originally shared this post: Lawrence Lessig interviews Jack Abramoff about the US political system, institutional corruption, and strategies for reform. I knew this was going to be great immediately based on the participants. Lawrence Lessig studies political corruption at Harvard and has been advocating a proposal to soften the dependence of the political system on outside money (See: Rootstriking ), while Jack Abramoff is arguably one of the most effective (former) lobbyists in the business. He did hard time for some abuses, but as they make clear, the legal restrictions are so loose its almost hard to imagine the need to break them. I thought this conversation was extraordinarily fascinating, especially for some of the specific insights into the actual mechanisms of power used by this class of people – “that world” as Jack calls it – and also because this is exactly the kind of insight that needs to be accounted for in order to craft a smart strategy to reign in the corrosive dependence of politicians on private money that has denied them of any real autonomy. Jack seems pretty genuinely reflective, ashamed and serious about trying to help contain the damage done by people like himself. I think we’d be wise to hear what he has to say. The meta-organization seeking to address this key structural issue is called United Republic, which incorporates several smaller organizations. I’d definitely encourage giving them a look, and your email: http://unitedrepublic.org/

#venustransit +Fraser Cain +Pamela Gay

Jon Lawhead originally shared this post: I’ve had a paper about the foundations of mathematics in my head for a while now. I had a long conversation with a good friend who does quantum field theory today, and found him unexpectedly sympathetic to the view. Now I’m thinking seriously about writing it. This is partly scratch paper for recording my thoughts, and partially an RFC. If anyone out there has any thoughts about this, please chime in. I’ve always been sympathetic to a kind of formalism, and I think that the big objections that get raised to the formalist program aren’t necessarily fatal. The spirit of the program can (I think) be decoupled from Hilbert’s personal project of providing a complete and consistent foundation for arithmetic (which Godel torpedoed), and from the formulation that requires all of mathematics to computerized. The spirit of formalism just requires that mathematics be thought of as kind of symbol manipulation game in which we play around with constructed formal systems, deducing as many consequences as we can from a set of axioms. I think it’s possible to give a concrete version of formalism that satisfies this spirit, but which doesn’t run afoul of either the Turing or Godel-based objections. In particular, I’d like to target the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” argument (which sort of parallels the “no miracles” argument in the philosophy of science. The quick and dirty version of that argument is that if mathematics isn’t “discovering” genuine truths about real objects in the world, it seems incredibly miraculous that so much of contemporary mathematics has turned out to be so useful for doing science. It seems to me that this is something like being astonished by the fact that so many words in the English language actually represent objects in the real […]

The Eulerizer Our goal is to reveal temporal variations in videos that are difficult or impossible to see with the naked eye and display them in an indicative manner. Our method, which we call Eulerian Video Magnification, takes a standard video sequence as input, and applies spatial decomposition, followed by temporal filtering to the frames. The resulting signal is then amplified to reveal hidden information. Using our method, we are able to visualize the flow of blood as it fills the face and also to amplify and reveal small motions. Our technique can run in real time to show phenomena occurring at temporal frequencies selected by the user. More: http://people.csail.mit.edu/mrub/vidmag/ via +Tim O’Reilly ___________ Check out the infant video at 1:52. With just video input, you can get a direct visualization of vital signs. Simply amazing. http://youtu.be/ONZcjs1Pjmk

John Baez originally shared this post: Q: What’s negative information? A: I could tell you, but then you’d know even less… Just kidding. In 2005 Michal Horodecki, Jonathan Oppenheim and Andreas Winter wrote a nice paper on negative information. I find it a bit easier to think about entropy. Entropy is the information you’re missing about the precise details of a system. For example, if I have a coin under my hand and you can’t see which side it up, you’ll say it has an entropy of one bit. Suppose you have a big physical system B and some part of it, say A. In classical mechanics the entropy of B is always bigger than that of A: S(B) ? S(A) where S means ‘entropy’. In particular, if we know everything we can about B, we know all we can about A. In quantum mechanics this isn’t true, so S(B) – S(A) can be negative. For example, it’s possible to have an entangled pair of electrons with no entropy, where if we look at either one, it has an entropy of one bit: we don’t know if it’s spin is up or down. The paper by Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter studied the implications of negative information for communication. There was a popularization here: Quantum information can be negative, Phys.org, 4 August 2005, http://phys.org/news5621.html but I understood less after reading it than before, so I decided to write this. Puzzle: why do physicists use S to stand for entropy? [quant-ph/0505062] Quantum information can be negative Abstract: Given an unknown quantum state distributed over two systems, we determine how much quantum communication is needed to transfer the full state to one system. This communication measures the &…

The Handshake Protocol via +Jennifer Ouellette “This is a choreographed sequence that allowed these digital devices to piggyback on an analog telephone network. “A phone line carries only the small range of frequencies in which most human conversation takes place: about 300 to 3,300 hertz,” Glenn Fleishman explained in the Times back in 1998. “The modem works within these limits in creating sound waves to carry data across phone lines.” What you’re hearing is the way 20th century technology tunneled through a 19th century network; what you’re hearing is how a network designed to send the noises made by your muscles as they pushed around air came to transmit anything, or the almost-anything that can be coded in 0s and 1s.” More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/06/the-mechanics-and-meaning-of-that-ol-dial-up-modem-sound/257816/ ___________ The #handshake protocol is the way we got our machines to talk to each other. Now there is more machine conversations happening online than human conversations. Yet humanity is so generous that we’d turn these grating noises not meant for us into fond memories, and even music. Consider Aphex Twin’s Corn Mouth: http://vimeo.com/20505006 From a review of the album: “Make no mistake, this is NOT dance music. But it is music, and more importantly music generated by technological devices. And in an industry where such devices amount to incesant counting 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, James taps out secret messages to us in what can only be described and this incredible, ambient morse code.” The Mechanics and Meaning of That Ol’ Dial-Up Modem Sound Pshhhkkkkkkrrrrkakingkakingkakingtshchchchchchchchcch*ding*ding*ding”