The Next 25 Years (Ray Kurzweil)

NYT - 12.28.2010 by Ray Kurzweil)

Thirty years ago, I realized that timing was the key to success as an inventor. Most inventions fail because the timing is wrong — the innovation needs to make sense for the world that will exist when the project is finished.

Consider how quickly the world changes; just a few years ago, most people didn’t use social networks, wikis or blogs. As an engineer, I gathered a lot of data to try to make sense of technology trends, and found a significant exception to the notion that “you can’t predict the future.”

If you plot the basic measures of the price to performance and capacity of information technologies (for example, computer instructions per second per constant dollar, bits of memory per dollar, or the total number of bits being moved around over the Internet), they follow remarkably smooth — and foreseeable — trajectories. This observation goes well beyond Moore’s Law (which says you can place twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every two years); in the case of computation, it goes back to the 1890 American census, long before Gordon Moore was even born.

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Are You Conversing with an Artificial Intelligence?

Many people wonder: Will the first artificial general intelligence come upon us with great fanfare, or quietly and beneath our notice? According to this "leading web tycoon," it could be the latter, and very soon you won't know if you're interacting on the web with a human or an AI.

The emergence of artificial intelligence is to transform the Internet industry and social networking over the next decade, Russia's leading web tycoon said in an interview on Tuesday.

The low-profile Yury Milner, chairman in the rapidly expanding Mail.ru Internet firm and CEO of DST Global investment company who built minority stakes in Facebook and other Western firms, made the comments in an rare interview with Vedomosti.

"I think that in 10 years if you ask a question on a social network and you get an answer you will not know if a computer or a person has answered you," Milner told the financial daily.

"When you receive a question, you will not know if it has been asked by a person or an artificial intelligence. And by answering you help the computer create an algorithm."

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Never have to ask "Have we met before?" again!

Live Science - 12.23.2010 by Michelle Bryner

'Smart' Eyeglasses Fill You In on What You're Looking At

New high-tech glasses track your gaze and display information about what you’re looking at, which could make a simple stroll down the street much more interesting.

Researchers in Finland have made a prototype pair of glasses that attaches to a small handheld computer and retrieves information from a database.

“The glasses recognize people and some objects you see, and try to infer if you would be interested in getting more information about them,” said study co-author Samuel Kaski, director of the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology at Aalto University.

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Augmented Reality - Big Improvements Coming

NYT - 12.20.2010 by Nick Bilton

Kazuhiro Nogi/Getty Images

Over the weekend I used a new iPhone application, Word Lens, to perform magic tricks for anyone who would watch. Word Lens isn’t really a magic app, but using it was kind of magical for me, almost like seeing Houdini perform in real life. The app is an augmented reality program that can translate text from English to Spanish, and the other way around, instantly through the iPhone’s camera.

It works like this: I hold the iPhone over this blog post, and it instantly translates my words into Spanish. Word Lens is one of the first augmented reality apps that I’ve seen that moves beyond the gimmick stage. It may even be a useful addition to a mobile phone.

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Science Gives Teen Girl a New Bionic Hand - Very Cool

The science versus religion debate goes on and on, but friends, this is what science can do. I love it.



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Using Bending of Space to Contact Alien Intelligence

msnbc.com - 12.18.10 by Adam Hadhazy

Our own sun might represent the best communications device around, if only we could harness its power, scientists say.

If the sun's gravity could be used to create a giant telescope, people could send and receive intensely magnified signals that could allow us to call an alien civilization, some researchers propose.

According to Einstein's general relativity, the sun's behemoth mass warps space-time around it, which actually bends light rays passing by like a giant lens. If a detector was placed at the right focal distance to collect the light, the resulting image would be extremely magnified.

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More Evidence of NASA's Screwups

Slate - 12.7.10 by Carl Zimmer

On Thursday, Dec. 2, Rosie Redfield sat down to read a new paper called "A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus." Despite its innocuous title, the paper had great ambitions. Every living thing that scientists have ever studied uses phosphorus to build the backbone of its DNA. In the new paper, NASA-funded scientists described a microbe that could use arsenic instead. If the authors of the paper were right, we would have to expand our notions of what forms life can take.

This Paper Should Not Have Been Published

Redfield, a microbiology professor at the University of British Columbia, had been hearing rumors about the papers for days beforehand. On Monday, NASA released a Sphinxlike press release: "NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life." Like a virulent strain of bacteria, speculation exploded over the next three days. "Did NASA Discover Life on One of Saturn's Moons?" asked Gawker, a Web site that does not often ask questions about astrobiology.

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NASA Fires Another Dud

NASA has a bad habit of getting the world excited about an announcement concerning ET life and then firing a dud. A fizzle. Much ado about almost nothing.

Remember the big announcement about life found in meteorites from Mars? Turned out it was tiny things that could have been the remains of microbial life, but could also be naturally forming inorganic rock thingies.

Here we go again. A huge mystery announcement coming on Thursday about ET life! Turned out to be nothing of the sort.

NASA, please get a clue.

Here's the source material if you're even interested...

Astrobiologists: Deadly arsenic breathes life into organisms

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