Dead But Dreaming

Test Your Techno Tolerance

2008-03-25T01:41:07Z

You Score as a Transhumanist-Biotech

Transhumanists believe that humanity can and should strive to attain higher levels of physical, mental, and social achievement through the use of technology. They seek to extend human capabilities and improve the human condition through technology- supporting the quest for immortality, the conquering of death and disease, the amplification of human intelligence, and the capabilities of the human body.
Transhumanists recognize that over time and with technological advancements, man will realize new possibilities for society and human nature and achieve a posthuman condition (becoming more than human). Societal change is an important consequence of technological progress.
Because of this passionate trust in technological advancement, transhumanists generally see all technologies, as long as they don't jeopardize the non-corporeal consciousness of a person, as being beneficial both to society and to the happiness and advancement of the person. Transhumanists see benefit not only in technologies that address medical necessities, but also aesthetic or recreational demands. They support advances in cybernetics, genetic engineering in clinical settings, embryo design, and other technologies that allow individuals to take control of their biology, and the human species to take control of evolution.
Transhumanists can be either hard-technology oriented--more inclined to add microchips and machines to their lifestyle--or bio-technology oriented--preferring the softer, more natural advancements and modifications that are made available.
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Your Results

You scored as a TB

73.5% of people also scored as TB

Other Results

7.3% of people scored as BC

1.2% of people scored as BL

0.1% of people scored as LU

0.6% of people scored as TC

17.3% of people scored as TP

badges!

2007-04-26T21:52:54Z

from order of the science scouts...

Cynicism

2007-04-18T16:53:32Z

A friend sent me this...

BTW, let me tell you how the next couple days of news is going to go

- martification and heroification of all victims, each and every one an above average person
- some tenuous link between the shooter and heavy metal
- minor debate about gun laws
- more shots of young girls hugging each other
- hunt and persecution of The Scapegoat
- hindsight wrapped in Obvious Truth That Is Self-Evident clothing
- the hunt for more Local Connections by each and every news outlet
- Dr. Phil and Oprah hop on the bandwagon with tinkly piano music
- other universities and colleges spending gajillions on something that has a very low probability
- that money being wasted/squandered/pilfered, and the ensuing B-list scandal
- zillions of animated gifs created and posted to honour those killed as missed, never forgotten, loved, by those who barely knew them
- some unrelated B-list news event is pushed to the fore because by this time, really, everyone's tired of hearing about it and needs time "to heal"

to which I'd add

- crass speculators scoop up domain names like vatech-carnage.com and try to sell them on eBay with pitches like "GREAT name for MEMORIAL SITE development!!!"

Scandalous

2007-04-17T17:40:26Z

Retired RCMP staff sergeant Ron Lewis (my father-in-law) has been all over the news recently.

Post Mortal Syndrome

2007-04-15T23:55:35Z

Can science find a way to defeat death? Will it offer humans the gift of potentially endless, healthy life - and if so, at what cost? Will people spared the curse of ageing, and even of mortality itself, become inhuman - or more human than ever? And who or what will control this perilous boon? Government or corporations? 'Faith-based' caregivers? Organised crime? Or individual choice?

Post Mortal Syndrome is an exciting blend of thriller and science fiction, with a poignant love story at its heart.

Starting on Monday, 16 April 2007, Post Mortal Syndrome will be published every week day, five days a week in tasty, bite-sized chunks you can enjoy in a few minutes. Come back every day for another stimulating chapter, and be part of Australia's first ever online serialisation of a novel.

Building a better monster

2007-04-12T21:10:45Z

I recommend the latest c-realm podcast where KMO interviews Ben Goertzel.

Hurts to be green

2007-04-01T03:24:55Z

vector: mistressse7en

Oldest mammals

2007-03-27T15:59:58Z

A bowhead whale was estimated to be 211 years old at the time of its death (plus or minus 16%). I don't know of any reason to think whale cells are substantially different than human cells so this may indicate a possible human life expectancy.

AI in VR

2007-03-26T21:12:06Z

I find it interesting that Novamente is reorienting its business to develop virtual agents for MMOGs like World of Warcraft and Second Life. I wonder how many others are thinking along similar lines?

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-02-16T21:04:25Z

Eternal embrace

2007-02-10T03:31:10Z

I wonder who they were and what their story was...

XID: a simple system for secure internet identity

2007-02-03T20:34:53Z

I think the web can be taken to the next level with a simple design for distributed secure identity I call XID (eXtensible IDentity).

An XID looks just like an email address: name@domain (e.g. david@lucifer.com or lucifer@xid.neuronaut.com). The difference is what you can do with it. The key to the whole system is a very simple convention: given an XID you can use http://domain.com/xid/name to retrieve information about the identity.

For example:

http://domain.com/xid/name/pubkey to get the XID's public key certificate
http://domain.com/xid/name/aliases to get an list of other XIDs shared by this identity
http://domain.com/xid/name by itself to get a directory of information (just a table of contents) available for this XID

An XID can have as much or as little security as the owner wants. For example, password protected or locked to an IP address or military-grade biometrics.

An XID can be used to store and share information with selected groups, e.g. contact information (business card), credentials, contact list, bookmarks, ratings and reviews. The information published would depend on the XID of the requester. If no XID is provided only public information is retrievable. If the XID provided (or one of its aliases) is in a known group then potentially more information can be sent. For example if my XID is in your XID's friends group I may be able to see your calendar, photos and current location.

Secure credentials can be implemented with XID in a couple ways. An XID can publish a certificate signed by another XID. To prove that I have an M.Sc. from the U of C I would store a text document with the details that is cryptographically signed by the public key of the U of C's XID. To verify it the requester software would retrieve
http://ucalgary.ca/xid/name/pubkey (maybe the name would be left blank for organizational XIDs?) and use the public key to decrypt the document and verify the credential. The other way is just to publish a claim to a credential and let the requester software retrieve the documents from the XID of the issuer. In either case the requester must verify the credential with the issuer XID which makes it secure.

Email can be signed with an XID. This will allow much better filtering and may eliminate spam altogether.

Once you are signed into an XID the potential exists for you to automatically sign into any web site that supports XIDs. This would eliminate the need for a different user account on every site.

Some advantages of this approach:

easy transition from email addresses to XIDs
no central authority, different domains can install their own versions of XID web server extensions that all interoperate if they follow the protocol
built on existing web standards of HTTP and XML
XID providers can differentiate on security level provided, integration with existing services, and features of the XID editor provided to XID owners

Some questions:

can you see any fundamental problems with the approach?
would you like to help work on it? (request features, design, market, coding, testing)
what other problems can the XID system solve?
what is the best way to make this happen?
can you see any way to make money from developing the system? (the answer might be the key to making it happen)

Strange relations

2007-02-03T19:40:22Z

While researching the strange relation between random matrix theory (quantum mechanics) and the Riemann Hypothesis (pure mathematics) I stumbled across another unexpected relation. I would wager that math prof Nina Snaith and electronica musician Caribou (fka Manitoba) are siblings. My evidence:

in her thesis Nina thanks NSERC for support and her parents for the math genes
Caribou's last.fm profile mentions he studied math at the U of T and is the son of a McMaster mathematics prof Victor Snaith
Nina is presently a lecturer at the U of Bristol in the quantum chaos group
Caribou is presently a Ph.D. student at Imperial College London

Keith Henson in custody

2007-02-03T18:09:21Z

On 26 Apr 2001, Keith Henson was convicted of "interfering with a religion", a misdemeanor under California law, for picketing outside Scientology's heavily-armed, razor-wire enclosed base outside Hemet, CA. Fearing death threats he fled the US to Canada but was unable to acquire official refugee status has been on the run ever since. In the #virus IRC channel he mentioned a couple times that his current location was the Mortmain Mountains. I just got news this morning that he has been taken into custody. A blog has been set up as clearing house for information pertaining to his arrest.

new Puppy

2007-02-01T04:01:14Z

Skinny Puppy's latest Mythmaker is a seamless continuation of The Greater Wrong of the Right. Dark and complex, it is sure to please old and new fans alike. Most excellent.

Lucifer recommends

2007-01-27T04:18:45Z

2 movies: Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth
and one RSS feed aggregator: Google Reader. You can share stories.

Mr. Deity

2007-01-25T02:56:51Z

2006 in review

2007-01-01T05:07:23Z

vector: subdermal

1.) Where did you ring in 2006?
Same thing as this year, quiet evening at home in Canmore.

2.) What was your status by Valentine's Day?
Increasingly cynical

3.) Were you in school (anytime this year)?
Nope

4.) How did you earn your keep?
Code monkey for a financial risk management software corp.

5.) Did you ever have to go to the hospital?
Several times. When the squid was born, and when he had had his surgery.

6.) Have you ever encountered the police?
I saw them coming and kept a safe distance.

7.) Where did you go on vacation?
Hawaii in April and the Maritimes in August.

8.) What did you purchase that was over $500
A Mazda 3 for Se7en and a leather chair for myself.

9.) Did you know anybody who got married?
We went to Newfoundland for Se7en's friend's wedding.

10.) Did you know anybody who passed away?
Not really.

11.) Have you ran into anybody you graduated high school with?
I keep in touch with 3 friends from high school. One of them just moved to California to work for EA on the Wii version of the Sims.

12.) Did you move anywhere?
No

13.) What sporting events did you go to?
I took a co-worker from Ireland to a Flames game.

14.) What concerts did you go to?
NiN, Ministry, Tool, Combichrist (good times!)

15.) Are you registered to vote?
I guess

16.) If so, did you do your patriotic duty on Nov. 7?
Voting is a right, not an obligation

17.) Where do you live now?
I split my time between the Canmore house and the Calgary house

18.) Describe your birthday.
Totally kickazz 40th at the Bamboo Lounge featuring the musical stylings of Forbidden Dimension.

19.) What's the one thing you thought you would never do but did in 2006?
Become a father

20.) What is one thing you regretted this year?
The usual, failing to meet my own expectations.

21.) What's something you learned about yourself?
I value my friends more every year.

22.) Any new additions to your family?
The squid!

23.) What was your best month(s)?
April, August, October, December

24.) What from pop culture will you remember 2006 by?
This year wasn't great for movies but I quite enjoyed The Departed and Apocalypto. TV worth watching: Dexter, Battlestar Galactica, Weeds, Big Love, Rescue Me, House, The Unit, Criminal Minds. Favourite albums this year are the new ones from Tool and Delerium.

25.) How would you rate this year with a scale from 1 (shitty) to 10 (excellent)?
Overall pretty decent: 8.35

How I spent xmas eve

2006-12-29T04:01:01Z

I was wondering about the probability of finding a message somewhere in the digits of Pi.

The probability of finding a message in a random bitstring depends only on the lengths of the message and random string.

A is a specific string of length N bits
B is a random string of length M bits

What is the probability that A appears somewhere in B?

B has M-N+1 substrings of length N
The probability that any given substring is A is 1/2^N= 2^-N
The probability that any given substring is not A is 1-2^-N
The probability that all substrings are not A is (1-2^-N)^(M-N+1)The probability that at least one substring is A is 1-((1-2^-N)^(M-N+1))

Example 1, what is the probability of the sequence head-head-tails appearing somewhere in 20 coin tosses?

If N=3 and M=20, P=1-(1-2^-3)^(20-3+1)= 0.909604886

Example 2, what is the probability that "David" encoded in 8-bit ASCII appears somewhere in the first billion bits of Pi?

If N=40 and M=1e9, P=1-(1-2^-40)^(1e9-40-1) = 0.00090908120...

That seems counter-intuitive until you recognize that there are 2⁴⁰ = 1 099 511 627 776 (just over 1 trillion) possible 5-character names.

How big does M have to be before finding A becomes likely (>50%) or very likely (>90%) or inevitable (>99.99%) or certain (>99.9999 bet your life)?

P = 1-((1-2^-N)^(M-N+1))
ln(1-P) = (M-N+1)ln(1-2^-N)
(M-N+1) = ln(1-P)/ln(1-2^-N)
M = (ln(1-P)/ln(1-2^-N))+N-1

So using the example above, how far would you expect to seach the digits of pi before finding "David" encoded as 8-bit ASCII?
It becomes likely (P=50%) at 762,123,384,824 bits.
It becomes very likely (P=90%) at 2,531,719,083,728 bits.
It becomes inevitable (P=99.99%) at 10,126,876,334,797 bits.
It bcomes certain (99.9999%) at 15,190,314,502,144 bits.

So how about a 40-character message like the one in my story, Revelation? This proved to be a bit harder to calcuate even with the arbitrary precision math built into the python programming language. Fortunately I was able to detect a pattern an extrapolate from calcuations with shorter message lengths. The number of bits of pi you would have to search to make it likely (>50% probability) to find Enki's 40-character message is 1.5 * 10⁹⁶. So the probability of finding that message in the first billion bits of pi is about 6.75 * 10^-88.

Extropians quoted

2006-12-27T21:35:40Z

I was pleasantly surprised to discover two Extropian colleagues quoted in (relatively) mainstream media.

In the December Wired (p. 46) Robin Hanson answers the Ping question "Is collective intelligence really more intelligent?"

Companies often wonder: Should we consult a broad opinion poll or a blue-ribbon committee? Prediction markets offer a better way. Because these markets reward being right and penalize being wrong, they tend to be dominated by a few experts when the experts know best, and by the masses when the crowd knows best. Either way, you win.

In What We Believe But Cannot Prove, Ray Kurzweil says "We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information." In the elaboration he says, "The computational neuroscientist Anders Sandberg estimates that a one-nanometer wormhole could transmit a formidable 10⁶⁹ bits per second."

Aging Symposium

2006-12-16T07:10:53Z

The Edmonton Aging Symposium has lined up an impressive array of speakers. Very tempting.

Revelation

2006-12-11T00:23:16Z

I wrote a (very) short story, Revelation, to illustrate a point. Feedback welcome.

Frackin' A

2006-12-08T16:49:58Z

Battlestar Galactica has given us one of the best and funniest loopholes ever.

Shadow wyrmling

2006-12-08T03:01:59Z

I'm rather fond of my newest Second Life avatar...

wikkid smaht

2006-12-07T01:39:16Z

I enjoy xkcd webcomic ... especially this one.