yarikson's posterous

Sean Carroll on the arrow of time

via ted.com

A brilliant lecture about time, entropy and universe.
Cosmologists can think beyond the closed "reality box", placing our universe into a larger system (multiverse), which allows to keep the local entropy low, at the same time not limiting the growth of the overall entropy of the system. This gives some chances to escape the boring thermal equilibrium at the end, when everything ends up as a bunch of protons diffusing through an empty space ;-)

Don't miss the second part of the lecture:
http://www.ted.com/talks/sean_carroll_on_the_arrow_of_time_part_2.html

Boggle your mind: Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Literally mind-boggling piece of work. Convincingly shows a high probability that we are "living" in a computer simulation. Unless (1) humanity will go extinct before reaching "posthuman" technological stage (which some scientists believe to be as close as several decades away); and/or (2) our descendants will never run an "ancestor-simulaiton". In the latter case the computational resource does not appear as a limiting factor, in my opinion making this possibility somewhat unlikely (really cannot imagine that our descendants will lack curiosity to run such simulations).

At some point author brings up analogies between hierarchical structures of many religious confessions and architectures of nested simulated realities (virtual machine in virtual machine in virtual machine ...). I.e. where "the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.". This part yields peculiar inferences on the morality and afterlife issues ;-)

So, Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?

Enhanced researcher: UV-Vis-IR spectrophotometer fused to an optical nerve

For a bench-working Life Science researcher, would be an awesome asset to have enhanced resolution + precision of visual perception in the range from 190 to 700 nm. Could quickly estimate the concentration of substances in tubes & etc.

The concept is not totally crazy – one could soon engineer cells with enhanced/transgenic light-harvesting receptors providing high sensitivity over a wide wavelength range.

The nano-tools would be another option, but at the moment this seems a bit more crazy than the genetic engineering approach.