On the 27th, which was 8 days ago, now, Jon Stewart had Andrew Napolitano on The Daily Show. I am a self-described libertarian. I voted for Ron Paul in 2008 (yes, I know he wasn’t on the ballot). I also love The Daily Show and Mr. Stewart; I think he’s insightful, wise, and funny.
Here’s the first part of the interview I’m going to be commenting on, I encourage you to click-through to see the next two parts.
I am having a conversation with Rod Furlan over on his blog about the possibility of self-preservation being an emergent property of intelligent systems. Just, you know… in case you were curious what I’m up to.
Edit: I am commenting. I did not send the original email.
Fire, frozen in apple’s sweet shape,
From promethean serpent it was sent.
A rite of passage from “mere ape”;
Extended forehead was Eve’s punishment.
We are not Abel; we are Cain.
Brother rots in Neandertal.
Over all of Gaia we now reign.
Child monarch of mother thrall.
Stumbling from Darwin’s crude workshop,
We see a world built for us, and cry
“Ours is the head with the crown atop.
Our godly form you cannot deny!”
In flatland, with the acute all around,
A right triangle styles itself obtuse.
Downgazing ants on a fragile mound.
Blind Cronus awaiting sighted Zeus.
Rysade asks:
What does clustering have to do with perception?
All it takes is a question!
To start, let’s take a functioning neural net (never mind how it learned), which is a well understood perceptual system. In a NN, each “neuron” is hooked to a bunch of others by weights. As the other neurons activate they influence the neuron in question with a degree related to their weight. Sensor neurons are activated from outside the net and the activations of “hidden” neurons is read off. Because a specific subset of input patterns will cause each neuron to fire, each neuron can be thought of as a lossy representation of the input space.
Here is the expanded version (still not what I would consider an “entertaining” level of detail) of a sci-fi plot I talked about on Twitter. I’m thinking it might work well as interactive fiction. Please let me know if it’s too ambiguous or there’s something you don’t like or whatever.
Julio, a 12-year-old boy, is exploring a jungle island with his best friend, a talking dog named Maximiliano. The two of them are looking for the buried treasure of a Spanish conquistador.
