Intel CTO Justin Rattner on the singularity and the future of computers

Wolfram Alpha

I just woke up and realized Wolfram Alpha went live during the night. I don't know what to make of this search engine that isn't a search engine yet. But I asked it for the chemical structure of dopamine and I got it. And how could you not love its error message:

I've got too much time on my hands

A slice of shark brain with lemon

Politics fatigue. The US election is over and all the politics podcasts and news have lost their bite. Hillary as foreign minister, so what? The economy tanking, who cares? Keith Olberman's attempts to sound as excited about the political news now as he did before the election are off key and Democracy Now won't stop heaping shit on not-even-president-yet Obama. But even Obama is boring now. Another 'stimulus package', wake me up in a month or two, seriously, who gives a shit? (And all the while Israel is starving Gaza.. that still lights a spark somewhere, but is it being discussed? nooo, course not. Because, to paraphrase Obama; 'that shit is sacrosanct'.. yea he actually used that word.. right before bringing Rham Emanuel on board.. but I digress....)

So that's half my podcasts rendered impotent, half my daily entertainment gone. And to top it all Entitled Opinions go on hiatus. Shit. Post-election, post-SfN blues. Even Twit has lost it's umpf.

So, back to basics. Back to work. Think of the absence of distractions as an opportunity to take a closer look at what I'm working on. An intelligent circuit. A biologically inspired circuit. Biologically inspired circuit design.

Sooner or later we all come up against network theory. We all need large data-sets for strong patterns to emerge, but then the variables are too many and the maths are too hard. For this we need intelligent circuits.

NASA knows this. NASA even uses an artificial neural network to handle the plants they're bringing to Mars. But it's unlikely that it's a network modeled on a biological circuit. We don't have programs like that, not yet.

Ray Ozzie: New Microsoft Chief Software Architect

Ray Ozzie replaces bill gates as Microsoft chief software architect = live mesh site wiki

XKCD

I'm not a huge fan of XKCD, but sometimes he gets it just right, like today.

Computing day

Gordon Moore speaks about the evolution of the computer chip (28min, UCTV).

Jack Dongarra on high performance computing (55min, googletechtalks).

Ben Goertzel on the current state of artificial intelligence research (1h3min).

Not bad, not great

Chomsky on himself and his political mindset (59 min, YouTube).

William Overholt on Asia and Asia-US relations (1h6min, FORA.tv).

Stanford Computer Science Department Faculty: Future Challenges in CS (1h31min, iTunes).

Finally, the flying spagetti deity gets a statue:

Getting tired of technology and globalization

1971 Woody Allen Interview :)

Been perusing the CSE Colloquia 2007 and similar lectures on technological development lately, mostly through iTunes U so it's hard to link. Hard to summarize too. Ed Lazowska's 'Computer Science: Past, Present and Future' was particularly good. Multicore processing and cloud computing are big. Quantum computing, which some believe holds the holy grail of allowing us to solve large complex systems, has had a few big breakthroughs (Yale university has a few lectures on this, also on iTunes U) but sceptics say it's a long way away and that the commercial D-wave Systems quantum computer is nothing but a fancy laser pointer. Nanotech is picking up speed, particularly biosensors (again, Yale).

Morning

John Markoff writes in the New York Times about Microsoft's $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo. Slightly esoteric analysis at times but some interesting facts and observations about the computer market. "Internet technology ("cloud computing") has overtaken the PC desktop as the center of the action, as people increasingly view the computer as merely a doorway to their virtual world." Says 1 billion people have personal computers and 3 billion have cellphones. Mentions Intels new mobile phone microprocessor Silverthorne.

An intresting new concept apparently growing in popularity: attention economy. First articulated by Herbert Simon (1971): "...in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else:.. the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it".

Thanks to Laura for blogging Nature's editor-in-chief's eloquent, well-balanced change of mind about human cognitive enhancement.