Tag: books

Automata

Recently I have been reading A new kind of Science before falling asleep. Besides being just plain beautiful, its main message so far has been: Complexity rises out of simple conditions
I’m not yet fit enough with the concepts to generalize and apply the book to other areas, but then again I have barely read 10%

2024-05-07: Wolfram continues to work in this area, and this recent post using automata as a model for evolution is a masterpiece.

The intuition of physics tends to be that there are ultimately simple models for things, whereas in biology there’s a certain sense that everything is always almost infinitely complicated, with a new effect to consider at every turn. But presumably that’s in large part because what we study in biology tends to quickly come face to face with computational irreducibility—whereas in physics we’ve been able to find things to study that avoid this. But now the commonality in foundations between physics and biology suggests that there should also be in biology the kind of structure we have in physics—complete with general laws that allow us to make useful, broad statements. And perhaps the simple model I’ve presented here can help lead us there—and in the end help build up a new paradigm for thinking about biology in a fundamentally theoretical way.

Refreshingly tasteless

i’m in that mood again. when everything tasteless has a mesmerizing quality, and the mind yearns for relief from the onslaught of facts that is also known as prepping. lucky me that i rediscovered a book that i had never opened so far. here is a sample.

Louis XIV of France (1638-1715)
During the French Revolution the tomb of the French king was wrecked and plundered. His heart was stolen and sold to Lord Harcourt who later sold it to the Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend William Buckland. One night at dinner, the Dean, who liked to experiment with food, ate the embalmed heart.

if only i could remember who gave me that book as a gift. must have been a kindred spirit.

Removing bottlenecks

RSVP is a well-known method of reading. It allows for very fast reading. Using RSVP some people can read 2000 words per minute, compared with most people’s reading rate that averages 300 words per minute.

i totally need that. absorbing information is my main bottleneck these days. any increase would have enormous consequences. if i could speed up my reading 5 times.. jeez!

the wall street journal is picking up on one of my favorite programs, mindmanager. i still hope that someone like microsoft picks up on that and finally gives us tools to think, not just dumb office suites to process finished concepts.

Let a 1000 weblogs bloom

I have started to read the Lexus and the olive tree, a book about globalization. It has many inspiring thoughts in it. It got me thinking what i could do to unlock some value that is hidden within the brains of my surroundings. Raising literacy and the level of discourse is an obvious candidate. Therefore, my aim is to make it easier for folks to communicate their thoughts and share it with others. This comes down to setting up a lot of new weblogs, making it easy to connect them to each other, and so on. I’d like to do these things:

  • Provide an out-of-the-box weblog system for rainbow customers
  • Promote weblog usage and research into their significance through cooperation with the literature department at University of Zurich.
  • Promote weblog usage among friends and family by assisting them & teaching them
  • Move more of my communication to weblogs, ie think of ways to attach email flows to my weblog
  • Research more on the topic of management by weblog.

Foresight Institute

Reading Vernor Vinge’s A fire upon the deep has raised my interest in hard science fiction a lot. Vinge raises so many questions in his book that one wonders how the world well prepare for what is to come. Vinge, the mind behind the Vinge singularity (describing a process of self improvement that is exponential, going off-scale rather quickly) also talks about nanotechnology. That is when I came across the Foresight Institute, a charity after my liking. Instead of fiddling around with the present human condition (which is worthwhile, but maybe not the best use of resources), its goal is

to guide emerging technologies to improve the human condition. Foresight focuses its efforts upon nano technology, the coming ability to build materials and products with atomic precision, and upon systems that will enhance knowledge exchange and critical discussion, thus improving public and private policy decisions.

There is so much to write about and so little time. Next time I shall mention the concept of future shock, extropians and so on.

Bangkok Day 3

After a nice breakfast at the incredible Atlanta, I head to town to work on my emails. At 14.00, I decide to go to a spa to make use of the 555 baht special deal where you can have massage, sauna, body scrub, manicure, haircut, for 20 bucks.

At 14.10, I call Siemens Thailand. They invite me over for an interview (so no spa today). I have a nice chat with them, resulting in a job offer around 16.00. Afterwards, I finish Bill Gates “Business @ the speed of thought:”. I then head back to the Atlanta, chill out until 20.00. On the street, I then get bitten by a stray dog. 22.00: Sun arrives at Oliver’s apartment. 24.00:Ii am in the hospital to get vaccination against rabies (which that stupid dog surely had) 1.00: I eat noodles with chicken on the street. 1.30: We are shaking it at Bangkok bar.
2022-07-27: I may have dodged a huge bullet on that day. Rabies is scary.