amoruso

The short story you're thinking of is titled 'Trurl’s Machine'. It's the second story in the collection 'The Cyberiad'.

... a very good book, by the way.

Early in life I have noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. I saw troops who had fought bravely denounced as cowards and traitors, and others who had never seen a shot fired hailed as heroes of imaginary victories; and I saw newspapers in London retailing these lies and eager intellectuals building emotional superstructures over events that never happened. I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”

― George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938

"Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy"

He said it first, but I think your paraphrase is at least as good as the original formulation.

Greg Egan wrote a few of those.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonal_(series)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(novel)

Diaspora starts in this universe but ends up somewhere else.

That was funny. Laugh-out-loud funny. It read like a perfect satire of self-help pep talk advice.

John Cramer has been pointing this out for years (since the 1980s I think):

"The Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Nonlocality"

https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.00039

Also, Bell's inequality shows the state vector is nonlocal, and and that implies causality violation in relativity.

Third, quantum information theory has retrocausality in the form of negative entropy:

"Negative entropy in quantum information theory"

https://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9610005

Too many things pointing in the same direction. This is the right way to look at it.

If anyone wants to learn more about Bell's inequality, the simplest (real, no bullshit) explanation I've ever seen is by David Griffiths. You can follow it if you know the basics of calculus:

http://www.physics.umd.edu/courses/Phys270/Jenkins/Griffiths...

I'll add another recommendation for Tufte's writings on the Challenger explosion. It should be required reading for all engineers. People who criticize Tufte for oversimplifying miss the point entirely. It's not about analysis, it's about communication. It's one thing for domain specialist to have a complex, multi-dimensional understanding of their specialty; extracting a relevant summary for non-experts is something else entirely. If you've ever been in a meeting where you had trouble getting your point across, you should read this. Make diagrams like Tufte does to get your point across, make more detailed ones as backups if you need to dive deep into details.

http://williamwolff.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/tufte-cha...

The opposition to Galileo was not really religious or scientific. More than anything, it was political. You can't understand what happened outside the context of the religious wars of the time. His findings undermined the authority of the Catholic Church.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion

There are plenty of examples of political suppression of science in our own time. The Nazis and Communists were two extreme examples.

In our own society, religion doesn't have this kind of power any more. But there are still political pressures on researchers to be PC. I'll let you think up some examples yourself.

Here's what they're talking about, for those who want a picture:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orion_Arm

It's not really ad hominem. More like constructive criticism of his rhetorical style.

The article doesn't give any technical details. The website of the profiled company, Geometric Intelligence, doesn't have any technical details.

Cofounder Gary Marcus has a publication list at his academic webiste:

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gary/marcus_pubs.html

Cofounder Zoubin Ghahramani has his research available at his academic website:

http://mlg.eng.cam.ac.uk/zoubin/

Searle makes two assertions:

1) Syntax without semantics is not understanding. 2) Simulation is not duplication.

Claim 1 is a criticism of old-style Symbolic AI that was in fashion when he first formulated his argument. This is obviously right, but we're already moving past this. For example, word2vec or the recent progress in generating image descriptions with neural nets. The semantic associations are not nearly as complex as those of a human child, but we're past the point of just manipulating empty symbols.

Claim 2 is an assertion about the hard problem of consciousness. In other words, about what kinds of information processing systems would have subjective conscious experiences. No one actually has an answer for this yet, just intuitions. I can't really see why a physical instantiation of a certain process in meat should be different from a mathematically equivalent instantiation on a Turing machine. He has a different intuition. But neither one of us can prove anything, so there's nothing else to say.

I'm guessing it was originally 10 km. Someone probably added a scale bar in km and then was told to change the label to US customary units.

If you want a second opinion, Cosma Shalizi reviews A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram:

http://bactra.org/reviews/wolfram/

Yeah, it's good. Well written and not too long.

Yeah it's bad.

Also, I can't believe I forgot to mention Walter Duranty. He was writing around the time of these Hitler articles. As far as I know, no one paid him to do what he did - he just did it for the sake of journalist activism or something. There's a lot of that too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Duranty

This kind of thing still happens. I'll bet if you dug into the history of those Hitler pieces, you'd find out the Nazis paid some PR firm to arrange those articles. That's how it happens now. I'm sure it was the same then.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/01/the...

http://www.thenation.com/article/professors-paid-qaddafi-pro...

ahem:

“My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs) — or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy. I would arrest anybody who uses the word State (in any sense other than the inaminate real of England and its inhabitants, a thing that has neither power, rights nor mind); and after a chance of recantation, execute them if they remained obstinate! If we could go back to personal names, it would do a lot of good.

Government is an abstract noun meaning the art and process of governing and it should be an offence to write it with a capital G or so to refer to people … The most improper job of any many, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity …

There is only one bright spot and that is the growing habit of disgruntled men of dynamating factories and power-stations; I hope that, encouraged now as ‘patriotism’, may remain a habit! But it won’t do any good, if it is not universal.”

– J.R.R. Tolkien, letter to his son, 1943 (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien).

Not exactly what I would call fascist.

source:

http://rodbenson.com/2011/08/20/tolkien-on-anarchism/

This article reminded me of something I read a few years ago. What is it like to be really near a supernova? It's a quick read and entertaining too.

Life (Briefly) Near a Supernova:

http://www.nagt.org/files/nagt/jge/abstracts/Dutch_v53n1.pdf

The metallicity is listed as -0.55 [1].

Metallicity is on a logarithmic scale [2], so that's about 58% as many heavy elements as our solar system.

That seems freakishly high for a star that old. That might be the only reason it has planets at all. There aren't any heavy elements to make planets with in most stars that age.

[1] http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/kepler-444_c/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metallicity

Here's the original research paper if you're interested.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602

I'll just quote their introduction instead of trying to summarize the paper:

"Our goal is to create a single neural network agent that is able to successfully learn to play as many of the games as possible. The network was not provided with any game-specific information or hand-designed visual features, and was not privy to the internal state of the emulator; it learned from nothing but the video input, the reward and terminal signals, and the set of possible actions—just as a human player would. Furthermore the network architecture and all hyperparameters used for training were kept constant across the games. So far the network has outperformed all previous RL algorithms on six of the seven games we have attempted and surpassed an expert human player on three of them."