john cox made me aware of the most excellent alexa traffic analyzer. because alexa runs as spyware in the browser, they are able to collect lots of interesting data. and they make it available for analysis too, which i hadn’t expected.
interestingly, they fold subdomains into the top domain. i take 85% of all traffic going to *.abstrakt.ch. they currently only collect data from internet explorer users, so they may be misrepresenting sites with a large geek audience. also, they state that statistical significance is an issue for sites not in the top 100k.
I’m not sure that freewill, if it exists, requires any immeasurable quantum mechanical mumbo jumbo. The magic is not in any quantum mechanical phenomena inside the neurons, but in the standard physics arrangement of them.
More likely, the appearance of free will is result of the inability to perform 100% introspection into one’s own mind. I can no more “understand” the real-time machinations of my own mind than a Pentium processor can run a real-time simulation of its own transistors. Because I can’t perfectly introspect my subconscious, much of its output looks magically non-deterministic (hence the seeming similarity to quantum mechanical systems).
Any bounded-rational being would believe itself to have freewill based on its ability to take independent actions and its inability to introspect out all the causal factors underpinning its own actions. In reality, the system that creates intelligence can be 100% deterministic, just too complex for that intelligence to understand itself. Only a much more powerful intelligence could look down and see that these beings that think they have free will are actually operating on “simple” rules.
2007-03-23: Selecting for Gay Pagan Babies. Delicious logical quandaries.
Would the selection rob the child of free will? I don’t think so. What is being set is parts of personality traits, not the thoughts or reactions of the emerging person. They will bias and affect the thoughts, but no more and no less than any other personality traits. That these ones were selected does not give the parents more control over the child or predetermine its destiny. A theological argument against would be that God would make sure to give the right genome, and that parents should trust God to do it right. But if that is true, then God seems to like gays too.
2009-04-16: Strong Free Will Theorem. If indeed we humans have free will, then elementary particles already have their own small share of this valuable commodity. 2014-10-03: The free-will fix
New brain implants can restore autonomy to damaged minds, but can they settle the question of whether free will exists? If free will could be safely enhanced, would those with strengthened capacities be held to a higher standard?
We tend to take it for granted that conscious thoughts precede our actions. Indeed, our systems of morality, justice and moral responsibility are based on the notion that people are free to make thoughtful decisions. However, the US scientist Benjamin Libet’s groundbreaking 1980s experiments on the relationship between brain activity, conscious thoughts and physical actions caused some scientists and philosophers to rethink the concept of ‘free will’ and ask whether our decisions are made subconsciously before we’re even aware of them.
Quantum computing theorist, popular author, blogger, and scientist Scott Aaronson on the #MeaningOfLife, Enlightenment, Schrodinger, Heisenberg, the Matrix, balancing work and family, and why the universe is not just a simulation.
ElectAura-Net provides both broadband wireless(-like) networks and a meter-accuracy positioning system for indoor use. It is a kind of “intrabody communication” system that uses electric fields as transmission media, and the human body and floor as an Ethernet cable. In this system, a “communication-cell” (carpet size) can be shrunk down to one meter or less, and simultaneous access by many users can be realized. Ordinary intrabody communication systems cannot achieve long-distance communication between components such as body-worn devices and the floor.
Drew recently put Sooz and me on the guest list of Over the Rhine when they came to town. I enjoyed the concert, not having known the band before. As I remarked to some friends here, I am more on the electronica side and not very fond of guitar music. Over the rhine is a band that definitely helps to reduce my bias 🙂 For the curious, they have quite some mp3 online.
sooz introduced me to joshua darden. he is a type designer with the hoefler type foundry, working under the world-renowned tobias frere-jones. i took josh to the reorient party, and we talked a lot about typography and design. after a couple hours of non-sleep, i met joshua again, and we went to a flea market to look for type specimen books and other objects of interest. we then went to an appointment with irving oaklander who has one of the most exquisite collections of typography books in the world. standing in his store room in a nondescript NYC warehouse and browsing through the dusty tomes of the high art of typography awed me. my interest in typography was instantly rekindled, after it had been more or less sleeping for 10 years. with an expert guide like joshua it will be a total pleasure to go back into it.
my trip to NYC was totally awesome and reaffirmed my earlier experiences with manhattan. i love it for the intensity of every waking moment, the vanity people display with their huge lofts, the density of cool people to meet. i hate it for the arrogance of most manhattanites (although totally understandable from an urban lifestyle perspective), for the emphasis of form over substance (contrast to cambridge, where it is completely the other way around). i definitely will spend more time in NYC. in fact, it looks like i will be in NYC the next 2 weekends anyway, first to attend a halloween party in manhattan and hang out with sooz and josh, second to meet up with michael wechsler again who is always up to interesting stuff.
i visited the w3c headquarters today to meet with martin duerst. we had a good chat about various topics ranging from the xml spec stack to the state of unicode adoption to the quality of our alma mater (martin is a university of zurich alumnus). martin was quite impressed by the virtues of the bitflux editor. apparently, only editors with PUT support get the nod from TBL. maybe this nice piece of software can make some inroads at the W3C.
having met christina wodtke of boxesandarrows.com fame, i am convinced that the frontier for CMS is in the user-facing layers (information architecture especially), not in the bowels. The lower CMS layers are being commoditized, or at least are maturing considerably. as a tool vendor, it is our quest to help users develop accessible sites with a sound information architecture. if the tools could somehow steer the users to do the right things by virtue of following the path of least resistance.. this is the real frontier. i will ponder this subject a bit more in the coming days. oh and christina referred to me as the crazy swiss and was very intrigued by our experience with oscom. in fact, she invited me to a IA conference in february in austin. i’m intrigued.
i can post in html with my email client to my blog (through a special email-address linked to it), selecting multiple categories.(by specifying them in a X-Categories custom mail header). Attachments to the email are automatically placed in the right location.
interesting. of course, such functionality is crucial for moblogging too. the moment of release is coming nearer, but there is a place to play in the meantime.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 