Psybertron Asks

Cognition Research. Noticed that Gerry Wolff’s (Bangor Uni) stuff on SP (Simple is Powerful) Theory is now being marketed at Cognition Research as SP6.1 aimed at AI / NLP applications. (Link added to side-bar and resources page updated.)

Newsweek Blogging Article. Mentions Blogger and includes quotes from Ev.(Don’t they all ?) Interesting backgrounder.

Book Worm Meter Shut In 49% . . 51% Out Of The House Intellectual 95% . . 5% Moron High Attention Span 95% . . 5% Low Attention Span Bookitude 57% . . 43% Book Burner Book Worm 74% . . 26% Bug Stomper Take your bookworm readings. Picked up from Blogger “Ivy’s Blogenspiel” aka [...]

Read the Apoorva Patel article (tough going for a non-physicist), and had one of those WOW! moments. Just like one I remember in schooldays when I came across that integral that links e, i and pi in a single equality – spooky how three seemingly independant irrational numbers can co-exist in a single concept, I [...]

Thread on compai.nat-lang looking for predictive Markov Chain s/w to look for misinterpretation in the text of jokes, draws a humourous reponse from Darryl McCullough.QUOTEThey all laughed when I said I wanted to build a joke-telling machine.Well, I showed them! Nobody’s laughing now !UNQUOTE.Actually the post is quite interesting. (Strangely, Jim Balters threads on comp.ai [...]

Reading Michel Foucault’s “The Order of Things” (1966) first published in English in 1970, and came across his reference to “The Semantic Web”. Seems this is the origin of the expression ? A good read so far, about history and culture of language in classifying things. Interestingly in French the title is “Les Mots et [...]

General Knowledge Machine Research. Link picked-up from comp.ai.philosophyAlso Generic Artificial Consciousness (GAC) and MindPixel projects. Unfortunately statistically based on the “average” mind – collecting concensus from web contributors – but interesting. Mindpixel is overtly competitive with CYC.(Mindpixel’s featured book is Wolfram’s – New Kind of Science.)

Quote from Charles Richmond in the Thinking with Meat thread on comp.ai.philosophy QUOTE I believe that we should work harder to get people to think. I heard a comedian say once that he thought the little tags on hair-dryers that say “DO NOT USE WHILE SHOWERING” should be removed. His reasoning was: If you are [...]

Quantum Genetics ? Link, thanks to the other Ian Glendinning, to New Scientist summary of paper by Apoorva Patel linking the existence of precisely 4 bases in DNA to Quantum Computing algorithms at work in genetics. Contains a link to the full technical paper (pdf) Intriguing.

I’ve captured several more important links, originally embedded in the blog, now in the sidebar. Sasha’s is completely new to me and quite inspiring. These are rich links, though not necessarily all frequently updated blogs. (Still need to sort out old archives and link to new pages, so much search engine traffic is hitting the [...]

I’ve been using Argyris work together with emperor’s suit of clothes analogy in my Rationalisation thread for some time, but just discovered that Argyris published a Harvard Business Review paper with that title only a couple of years ago (1998).

Gimboland. Another intersted blog (spotted by Jorn), added to the side-bar.

The Wunderkind has no Clothes. (Via Jorn again). Quote from Heinz Pagels in a Wired review by Steven Levy of Stephen Wolfram’s meisterwerk “A New Kind of Science“.“Most scientists will find it difficult to believe that there’s a better way to do science.” OTT, unscientific, but intriguing thesis based on complexity underlying all phenomena, and [...]

Music, Mind & Meaning. Michael brought this Minsky paper to my attention last night. (It’s actually a chapter from The Neuropsychology of Music, ed Manfred Clynes, Plenum, NY 1981). The paper itself is also available on line at Marvin’s site.

One of my threads is (4) “Many a True Word” (spoken in jest). I now notice that Minsky has already covered the place of humour in knowledge, and in fact draws on Freud too.

BBC Radio 4 Today this morning, interviewing a head teacher and a local authority administrator about boring “safe” school playgrounds with no chance of injury – hit all key points. Individually all three in the studio arrived at same “some level of risk is a good thing” conclusion and noticed they’d agreed, but all said [...]

Political Heat (Chicago 1995). New Yorker (via Jorn again – how does he find them ?) review of book by Malcolm Gladwell. A complete set of rationalisations of poor decisions leading to many deaths, and the “political” reality and “act-of-god” justifications used. Interesting blend of science / engineering calculations in sizing power supplies and air-con [...]

. Just posted a first draft (barest outline actually) thesis / essay / paper on the threads emerging from this effort. Accessible from my Work in Progress page too. The threads identified are (1) Values & Levels, (2) Rationalisation, (3) Emergence, (4) Many-a-true-word. Bookmarks to this draft should avoid my continuing need to repeat myself [...]

Salon interview (via Jorn) with D. Quinn Mills author and professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, by Paul Roberts. Enron et al “evidence, not of the irrational exuberance of ordinary investors, but of a complete ethical collapse”. Also includes a reference to the McNealy (Fools Paradise for CEO’s) link blogged below, concerning [...]

Complexity and Info Overload. Recent draft paper (in pdf) by Heylighen for The Information Society.Covers – Ephemeralisation, Value judgements in identifying progress, Competitive selection and evolution, Friction, entropy and “send three and fourpence”, Several paradoxes in speed and efficiency of “miscommunication”, Chaos, and much more. (Two separate papers in fact – one on the symptoms, [...]

I’ve given up on the Tiscali take-over of my ukgateway.net domestic webspace, which is a pity ‘cos it went so smoothly at first. This site is now hosted on commercial space, ironically also hosted at Tiscali. If you haven’t noticed the status remark in the header above, please re-tune to www.psybertron.org. What was it Ev [...]