Clipmarks | pascual's clips

on mandela

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:20:16 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: intellife

Clip Source: www.moreintelligentlife.com

a part

Machel observes no lingering pain from his incarceration, aside from his guilt at missing his children as they grew up. "He developed a selective memory and he cherished the good things. Maybe it is of him having decided not to be bitter, so he talks of the positive side." Bill Clinton tells of asking Mandela if he was angry about the years lost to jail. Mandela said that he felt furious until the night before his release, when he decided to quash his emotions, because "if I stay bitter, then they will still have my mind in prison."

Tags: africa, society, conflict

science without hypotheses

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:50:46 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: edge

Clip Source: edge.org

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

Tags: science

on the fractal nature of space-time

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 18:22:13 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: sciam

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The outcome is pretty mind-boggling: the number of dimensions depends on the scale. In other words, if we let the diffusion go on for just a short while, spacetime appears to have a different number of dimensions than when we let it run for a long time. Even those of us who specialize in quantum gravity can scarcely imagine how spacetime could smoothly change its dimension depending on the resolution of one's microscope. Evidently, a small object experiences spacetime in a profoundly different way than a large object does. To that object, the universe has something akin to a fractal structure. A fractal is a bizarre kind of space where the concept of size simply does not exist. It is self-similar, which means that it looks the same on all scales. This implies there are no rulers and no other objects of a characteristic size that can serve as a yardstick.

Tags: physics

how reality is perceived

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 19:26:26 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: seed

Clip Source: www.seedmagazine.com

But the group's work on these kinds of applications pushed up against quantum mechanics' foundations. To repeat a famous dictum, "All information is physical." How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

I asked Dr. Zeilinger about this as I was about to leave his office. "In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time... It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both."

Tags: physics

is the singularity near?

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 18:21:33 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ieee

Clip Source: www.spectrum.ieee.org

Take the idea of exponential technological growth, work it through to its logical conclusion, and there you have the singularity. Its bold incredibility pushes aside incredulity, as it challenges us to confront all the things we thought could never come true—the creation of superintelligent, conscious organisms, nanorobots that can swim in our bloodstreams and fix what ails us, and direct communication from mind to mind. And the pièce de résistance: a posthuman existence of disembodied uploaded minds, living on indefinitely without fear, sickness, or want in a virtual paradise ingeniously designed to delight, thrill, and stimulate.

This vision argues that machines will become conscious and then perfect themselves, as described elsewhere in this issue. Yet for all its show of tough-minded audacity, the argument is shot through with sloppy reasoning, wishful thinking, and irresponsibility.

Tags: technology

Wu Fu, china's answer to starbucks

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:55:04 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: chinatoday

Clip Source: www.chinatoday.com.cn

As expected, Wu Fu’s good reputation has attracted numerous franchise applications over the past few years, and at first, Yang almost always gave the nod. Later, however, he came to realize that some franchises were not operating up to his exacting requirements. “They would imitate the design and decoration of the home shop, and purchase high-quality tea, but then would fail to adopt the company’s culture and management.”

As a result, Yang decided to slow down his expansion, and to focus on training instead. Each year now, at least two courses are held especially for Wu Fu’s 13 franchises nationwide.

In addition, having received expressions of interest from Australia and Britain in the past two years, Wu Fu has now established a timetable to open its first two overseas branches soon.

Tags: china

how chinese see themselves

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:59:32 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: chinatoday

Clip Source: www.chinatoday.com.cn

The Beijing-based Global Times newspaper recently conducted a survey of households in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Chongqing. Among the 1,300 respondents, 55 percent believed China could not be called a world power. This is a five percent increase over the same figure in 2006, despite surging economic growth throughout this period.

So why is there such a discrepancy between Western views of China as a superpower and the perceptions of the Chinese people?

Tags: china

greedy market speculators

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 18:21:11 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: spiegel

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

After investing in high-tech stocks and real estate loans for years, legions of speculators have now discovered commodities like oil and gas, wheat and rice. Their billions are pushing prices up to astronomical levels -- with serious consequences for ordinary people's quality of life and the global economy.

Tags: economy

what is consciousness?

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:50:46 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: nybooks

Clip Source: www.nybooks.com

Our conscious life is a constant flow, or integration, of an immediate past and the present—what Henri Bergson called le souvenir du présent (1908) and Edelman more recently called the remembered present (1989). Consciousness, in this view, is neither recalled representations nor the immediate present, but something different in kind (as colors are different in kind from the lightness and darkness of different reflected wavelengths).

Tags: neuroscience

buildings as commercial products

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:13:58 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: spiegel

Clip Source: www.spiegel.de

The "wow effect" is everything; it translates into structures mimicking lilies, harps, trophies, tents and other unconventional shapes.

Hamburg architect Volkwin Marg, who runs a thriving business in China with his partner Meinhard von Gerkan, isn't fond of this tendency toward representational building. For Marg, these "iconic buildings" lack social significance.

Peter Schweger, another architect from Hamburg, even describes the current trend as "absurd, atrocious blossoms of sculptural architecture." He has also noticed an impact on Western architectural aesthetics, where "buildings are starting to be designed like commercial products that can be aggressively marketed."

Tags: architecture

origin of the oil bubble

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:40:57 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: ft

Clip Source: www.ft.com

There is a growing feeling that the latest sharp upsurge in the price of oil may be a speculative bubble rather than an outcome of market fundamentals. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission indicated last week that there may be “system risk” and George Soros, the veteran investor, in testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, warned that commodity index funds, which treat oil as an asset rather than a commodity to be bought and sold for use, are creating a bubble.

Tags: economy

how to open your mind

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 21:19:07 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: projectsyndicate

Clip Source: www.project-syndicate.org

The concept of a dialogue between cultures is sometimes strained, or seems only a pious hope, because we ask it to do the impossible: solve inflamed political conflicts. Dialogue, as benevolent as it may be, can’t resolve questions related to people’s freedom of movement, or to the sharing of territory or natural resources. Politics and culture don’t work on the same level: the former governs action, the latter influences mentalities; the former deals with emergencies, the latter can require generations to produce any result.

We should work for this type of dialogue by beginning with simple and modest initiatives. We need more translations of the ideas and literatures of other countries, more long stays abroad for university students, more teaching of foreign languages and encouragement of study about other cultures, and more confrontation between national memories

Tags: globalization

the cost of US homeland (in)security

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:18:08 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: le monde diplomatique

Clip Source: mondediplo.com

When the history of this era is finally written, Osama bin Laden and his scattering of followers may be credited for goading the fundamentalist leaders of the United States into using the power in their grasp so stupidly and profligately as to send the planet’s sole superpower into decline. Above all, bin Laden and his crew of fanatics will have ensured that the real security problems of our age were ignored in Washington until far too late in favour of mad dreams and dark phantoms. In this lies a bleak but epic tale of folly worthy of a great American novelist. In the meantime, consider the following list – 15 numbers that offer an indication of just what the tai chi principle meant in action these last years; just where American energies did and did not flow; and, in the end, just how much less safe we are now than we were in January 2001, when George Bush entered the Oval Office:

Tags: globalization

information in black holes

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:10:19 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: physicsworld

Clip Source: physicsworld.com

The significance of the information paradox came to a head in 1997 when Hawking, together with colleague Kip Thorne at Caltech, US, put this argument forward as a bet with John Preskill, also at Caltech. Preskill believed that, in accordance with quantum mechanics, information loss is impossible because it prevents the equations governing the process from being reversible. But in 2004 Hawking conceded the bet, saying he now believed that information is returned, although in a disguised state.

Tags: cosmology

alternatives to gravity

Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:01:57 GMT

clipped by: pascual
clipper's remarks: physics

Clip Source: physicsworld.com

Mannheim's theory is still a geometric theory of gravity, but instead of tweaking general relativity he replaces the theory with one based on a fourth-order "Weyl tensor". While the mathematics of conformal gravity is complex, the theory has the highly desirable property that gravity is attractive at local scales yet repulsive at cosmological scales. As such, Mannheim's theory can account for both the accelerating-universe data and galaxy-rotation curves without dark matter, dark energy or any "fudging" of parameters. Like STVG, however, the full cosmological implications of conformal gravity still have to be worked out.

Tags: cosmology