Will Neuroscience shed light on the glide to singularity

NIH's Neuroscience video treasury --- its not organized yet in either historical or didactic sequence ... but there are a few gems there!

There are, no doubt, some really interesting talks that at the very least can assist in the inevitable glide to the singularity

Kaddish

Ok ... so i am reading a highly nonlinear book for a highly nonlinear reason ... it has to do with the coming nonity ...I am reading Kaddish by Leon Wieseltier. Some people like the book ... some people hate it ...some are just well some where else ...

magnified and sanctified ...

that's really the basics ...

If you're mourning .... that might be of use to you ... so anyway something to consider ... you'll run into the Pali samvega.

The Mystery of the Kaddish: Its Profound Influence on Judaism by Leon Charney is also touted ... don't know if i'll get to this one ... but just in case ... link is now captured.

Good Night Irene

Well ... its just a saying ... a canonical expression that got adopted ...

and besides ... its time for solitaire with a deck of 51

Beyond good fortune

Somewhen things occur that go beyond the unexpected in a good way. Is that good fortune? Is it beyond good fortune? What exactly is it? Is it random? How do you characterize that? What the H do you call it? Does fortune have a anything to do with it at all.

Is it a failure of the imagination -- or --
success beyond measure?

Strange Encounters with Uncertain Reality

Encounters with Einstein: And Other Essays on People, Places, and Particles By Werner Heisenberg is an interesting book. There an interesting little passage there:

... we see that we apparently have little freedom in the selection of our problems. We're bound up with the historical process, our lives are part of this process, and our choice seems to be restricted to the decision whether we want to participate in a development that takes place in our time, with or without our contribution ...

smacks of Schopenhauer's ... and

Dogs are still the only mammals not allowed on the beach ... where is the fairness in that?

nonlinearly strange as well is James Cameron's {Titanic) -- Strange Days ... released 13 October 1995 and on DVD 2002 ...

pretty strange if you ask me ... and might not be connected to quark strangeness at all ... or charm

Transactional Acceleration

Our Tek Era will have ushered a new type of acceleration -- Transactional Acceleration, or Acceleration of Transactions between individuals. I'm sure others have written about this, and I will have to search for the references ... at this point Nonlinear Parker doesn't have the details, but will need to return to this.

Basically, the speed of email / texting/ etc ...creates situations where it seems like the right thing to do is to respond to an email/txt message while the 'flow' is 'on' ... while the feeling is intense ... while all the facts and contexts are at one's finger tips. Tomorrow might be too late ... The day after tomorrow might never come about, if it does, too many things may have happened by then, and all relevance and intensity may have faded.

So where does that leave one ... the pace of communication is accelerated ... one says things one might not have said early on without more deliberation and forethought. It doesn't mean that they wouldn't be said - they might or might not, but if said they would be said after more deliberation ...

However, acceleration makes life interesting ... and opens up a lot of avenues ... some good some bad

Bad things happen to good people
Good things happen to bad people
But also
Bad things happen to bad people, and
Good things happen to good people


Random things happen to all of us ...
some of those random things are good .
and some are bad
and some of them turn out to be not so random


.................
Totally randoma and nonlinear ... it turns out that the phrase "Transactional Acceleration" appears in Expanding Realism: The Historical Dimension of World Politics By George Liska. And I thought it was all made up [by me] I guess that was too good to be true. In fact too many things turn out to be too good to be true. And that, friends, ... is the real truth of the matter

Ontology

Wikipedia's Definition:

Ontology is a study of conceptions of reality and the nature of being. In philosophy, ontology (from the Greek ὤν, genitive ὄντος: of being (part. of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία: science, study, theory) is the study of being or existence and forms the basic subject matter of metaphysics. It seeks to describe or posit the basic categories and relationships of being or existence to define entities and types of entities within its framework.

Its sister study, epistemology is a study of knowledge, including the search for answers to questions concerning how knowledge is acquired and maintained.

As a philosophical subject, ontology chiefly deals with the precise utilization of words as descriptors of entities or realities. Any ontology must give an account of which words refer to entities, which do not, why, and what categories result. When one applies this process to nouns such as electrons, energy, contract, happiness, time, truth, causality, and God, ontology becomes fundamental to many branches of philosophy.

But this is but a small part of the story .... for real men (and women) the Wikipedia offers this .. ontology in computer science

In both computer science and information science, an ontology is a data model that represents a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts. It is used to reason about the objects within that domain.

Ontologies are used in artificial intelligence, the semantic web, software engineering, biomedical informatics and information architecture as a form of knowledge representation about the world or some part of it. Ontologies generally describe:

* Individuals: the basic or "ground level" objects
* Classes: sets, collections, or types of objects
* Attributes: properties, features, characteristics, or parameters that objects can have and share
* Relations: ways that objects can be related to one another
* Events: the changing of attributes or relations

OK so there YOU have IT

and OH BY THE WAY ... Anything in ontology ... is for real-er men and women ....
I was just kiddin when talkin bout computers .... everybody knows that thats to make the geeks feel good .... wait a second ... they should be feeling good ... the richest man in the world is a geek ... and quite a few geeks are very rich ... so they don't really need special ego boosting .... (How's that for nonlinear logic?)

This is just too circular ...

not pleasure, but freedom from pain

The first and foremost rule for the wise conduct of life seems to me to be contained in a view to which Aristotle parenthetically refers in the Nichomachean Ethics: .... not pleasure, but freedom from pain, is what the wise man will aim at.

Arthur Schopenhauer
Counsels and Maxims
via eBooks@Adelaide

2000 Penn in DC -- (not far from GWU) is NOT painful at all ... how did we miss if for so long?

While My Guitar Gently Weeps

George Harrison, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr doing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Introduced by none other than Sir Elton John.


How do these come to be? Do they hold sway? A surrealist would cringe ...

Medical Ethics

Encyclopedia of Jewish Medical Ethics: A Compilation of Jewish Medical Law ... By Avraham Steinberg seems to be a very different kind of book ... one wonders about the comparative ethics of all religions then ... are the medical ethics of the different religions very different? If so -- How?

Influences

OK .. here are some books that influenced Mr. Parker ... not in any kind of order ... some of them are more 'kid level books' and some are more serious ...

Isaac Asimov - the Robot Series
Isaac Asimov - the Foundation Trilogy
Robert Rimmer - the Harrad Experiment [this is really orthogonal but lays some social ground work for ...]
Robert A. Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Piers Anthony - Macroscope
Paul A. M. Dirac -The Principles of Quantum Mechanics
Erwin Schrodinger - What is Life
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin - The Phenomenon of Man
Valentin Turchin - The Phenomenon of Science
Alfred Lotka - Elements of Mathematical Biology
Freeman Dyson - Infinite in all Directions
K. Eric Drexler - Engines of Creation
Erving Goffman - Stigma
Edward O. Wilson - Sociobiology: The New Synthesis
Vernor Vinge - Fire Upon the Deep
Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation
John Locke - An Essay Concerning Human Understanding -



Books that I really like:
Michael Flynn - In the Country of the Blind
Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card - Speaker for the Dead

Lotka's Elements of Mathematical Biology

Lotka 's Elements of Mathematical Biology is a truly impressive resource!

prescient might be the operative term on many matters from simple chemistry to global warming ... He points to the influence of Poynting on his work. He makes some remarkable observations -- they seem trivial at first but are really profound .. like:

"There's clearly a tacit assumption here that because two distinct words are found in the vocabulary, therefore two correspondingly distinct things exist in nature" ...Exposing such assumptions is priceless ...

Another priceless quote is:

But there is a blindness that is not in the eye, and there's a vision that surpasses optical vision

Nonlinear Business - NY Times free access

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night - according to their website ...

What changed, The Times said, was that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYtimes.com. These indirect readers, unable to gain access to articles behind the pay wall and less likely to pay subscription fees than the more loyal direct users, were seen as opportunities for more page views and increased advertising revenue.

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” Ms. Schiller said.

I can't wait ... hint hint WSJ ...

Now that's an example of nonlinear business thinking

Gotama Buddha

Gotama Buddha: A Biography (based on the Canonical Books of the Theravādin) By Kenneth James Saunders [Published 1920, Association Press] seems like a pretty good / even biography ...

notable points:
* Buddha = the Enlightened
* Tathagata = he who has reached the goal
-- -- goal reached only by effort ... characterized by ... joy, calmness, insight, end of the solicitings of craving
* Only one thing I teach, O monks, sorrow and uprooting of sorrow
* The first step is to get rid of the wrong notion of Self

Bojjhanga: Enlightenment
seven elements: Attentiveness, Penetrating Insight, Energy, Interest, Calmness, Concentration, Equanimity


Eben Holden takes:
* Minnit a man stops looking for trouble, happiness will look fer him

NP, NP,and NP

First NP - Nonlinear Parking ...maybe it could mean No Processing ... A mathematician would say talk about NP Completeness i.ed Non Polynomial ...I.e basically doable,

Of course .. there's the question NP=P? -- and the issue of NP completeness in complexity theory.

on the ToDo list

Visit Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti -- consider the one week seminar ...

g pi god and dice --coincidences?

This post is interesting ... it says

The acceleration due to gravity, at the surface of the Earth,
is about 9.81 m/s².

pi²= 9.87.

The approximate numerical equality of these numbers is not a coincidence.

coincidences anyone?


via God Plays Dice: A look at daily life through the eyes of a mathematician.

Spacetime Wrinkles Map

The Spacetime Wrinkles Map is interesting ... part of the Cyberia initiative ...

Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon

Fleetwood Mac - Rhiannon on UTUBE

This is jsut the sound with random pix

Stevie Nicks - Japan Rumours 1977 version - the video is weak - the sound interesting --- the music is of course great

Live 1975 is pretty fresh looking and is really good ...


I like this version too! Quite different in pace and flavor


--- did you know that Rhiannon was a Welsh goddess? see the wik
[the goddess story according to Wikipedia:" ... In the Mabinogion of Welsh mythology Rhiannon is the horse goddess, equivalent to Epona from Gaulish mythology. Rhiannon was a daughter of Hefeydd the Old. She was married to Pwyll, and later, Manawydan. ..."
There's a long and convoluted story there ... perfect for a nonlinear medieval picnic ...check it out. The FMAC music is awesome though so ... check the versions


a different treat "Sara" Live 2004

Oye Como Va, Evil Ways, Carlos Santana

"Oye Como Va" is a song written and composed by Latin jazz and mambo musician Tito Puente in 1963 in Cuba and popularized by Carlos Santana's cover of the song in 1970 on his album Abraxas, [from wikipedia]
the youtube-utuve version ... here ...

Evil Ways SANTANA LIVE 1971 - MONTREUX JAZZ FESTIVAL with Evil Ways [not a real great rendition] the - PS-MC Planeshift version is a peek at a new art form forming ... the sound is good though. This clip includes Shake your money maker & Evil ways and is pretty fresh

Black Magic Woman brings back a lot of memories ...

the live in Santo Domingo 1982 has a nice feel and hue to it ... and the Live in Tokyo, 1991 is yet another interesting rendition!

The Statler Brothers - Flowers On The Wall

The Statler Brothers - Flowers On The Wall - deserves a special mention and link ... this is one of the first truly modern nonlinear songs ... the Pulp Fiction version is orthogonal and amazing

Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells

some more classics via utube-youtube ... Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (Live 1973) part 1 of 3 ...the 2003 version


The Montreux 1981 Version is pretty neat too

brings back memories ...

U2 - Stand By Me with Bruce Springsteen

U2 - Stand By Me with Bruce Springsteen --- just incredibe music night here ..



which reminds me to comment about the nonlinearity of memory time ... what a compression .. a few notes and your transported decades ...

the 1961 Ben E King version is here

Eric Clapton- After Midnight

Eric Clapton- After Midnight/Little Queen Of Spades version




another classic ...


the JJ Cale version is here ...

Eric Clapton and JJ Cale together --- pretty striking!

whic poses the nonlinear question ... how many youtube inserts will blogger allow?

Eric Clapton - Layla (live) on You Tube

A few great music videos ...

Eric Clapton - Layla (live)



pretty awesome!

Machine-Written Fiction

Computhors and Biterature: Machine-Written Fiction? - consider checking this furthr via JSTOR

Peter Swirski
SubStance, Vol. 22, No. 1, Issue 70 (1993), pp. 81-90

Irving John Good

Irving John Good (IJ Good), certainly deserves a lot more attention. How did we miss him? Apparently he was indeed well known in some circles .... To my knowledge, he's still alive (age>90). He was directly affiliated with Turing and other key folks ... Statistician by trade ... he's really responsible for the notion of Ultraintelligent Machine and intelligence explosion. What I missed altogether is his early acquaintance with all things computer (in fact his speculations concerning the first Ultraintelligent Machine [UM] list a Atlas Computer Lab affiliation). He was right there at Bletchley Park ... IJGood authored all kinds of interesting material ... a really interesting one is The Scientist Speculates: An Anthology of Partly Baked Ideas ... yet more fascinating ... early involvement with Besicovitch ... Hausdorff measures, fractional dimensions of sets, Mandlebrodt ... and Zipf ... all before they got popular .... ouch ... How did I miss the UM paper for so long .... [the internet and google -misspelled goodle, what would one do with out them???).

In any case ... the question for tonight is how to measure the 'magnitude of nonlinearity'? Is there such a beast as maximal nonlinearity ? [apparently there is - for example this paper on ChaNoXity]

later - consider: Lady Luck: The Theory of Probability by Warren Weaver

straying from the main topic ... Good's Good! and that's that! lots to follow up on here ... the puzzle ... given Good's network ... why was UM so late in getting picked up as a more serious concept?

Another nonlinear day ...

Whats a nonlinear day? Basically, a day where many things happen, yet anything you consider in it, well ... you just can't predict real well, but these things are not real random. So the concept of Random, Nonlinear, and Non-random are coupled some how ...

One of the highly nonlinear events was running into someone who provided some 'gossip'/factual update on a common acquaintance ... having been overwealthy ...seeking adventure outside of marriage ... now divorced and essentially broke ... Not at all expected but not at all random ... and provides odd and unexpected ties to other events. It bring on consideration of all the 'human relationships' topic ... why they occur ... why the forms and durations ... the need for knowledge as well as the need and blessing of ignorance

Intelligence explosion ... over at the singularity diaries

So ... new thread over at the singularity diaries

why so slow

At the end of the day

At the end of the day ... well ... the day just ends!
That's it!

There's no reckoning, there is no balance, there is neither justice or injustice ...
its sort of just there ... where you recognize that time has passed ... no particular agenda was sought or achieved ...

all pretty random ... dreams of emergence were just fantasy ...
it could have been anything ....
the patterns that you found, were accidental ...
just manifestations of a hardwired brain looking for patterns in noise ...
because that has some survival benefit ...
those who find patterns in noise do better than those who find no patterns ...

if you can find a pattern in noise
you would likely be really good at finding a real pattern where there in fact is a real pattern.

Is this nonlinear - not likely ... its probably just nonelephant


Does this have anything to do with Possible Worlds or Kripke?

Ignorance, Illusion, Failure of Imagination

Nonlin Jog -- MFR:

Ignorance -- Ann Kerwin - expert on origin of ignorance - her site lives here
Nothing -- Elliot Hearst, Psychology of Nothing
Failure of Imagination - YKW, 9-11, PM, smoke and mirrors,Possible bspots ...hpots ??

Mystery of Lieserl ... and list of P producers ...

in any case - I forgot what I meant by P producers -- oh .. I just remembered ...TO ... remember ... in any case ignorance of ignorance is no excuse ... and its gotten late ... so zs are in order ...

K. Eric Drexler: Productive Nanosystems video

K. Eric Drexler: Productive Nanosystems: Toward a Super-Exponential Threshold in Physical Technology video is pretty neat ...



This is the link to the video



there many interesting links there too.

like Cory Doctorow exciting talk --- see the video

and there are lots and lots of other awesome video lectures at the Singularity Institute's Media Page ... which somehow breadcrumbs into the Arlington Institute ... what's with all these institutes> How nonlinear can you get?

Ray Kurzweil ...The Singularity Summit at Stanford

Ray Kurzweil ...The Singularity Summit at Stanford

ok so this is a nonlinear kind of video ... talking about the singularity

R .. K ..talks about the big sing ...


also demonstrating a new device for blind people...

somewhere someone talked about the convergence in 2012 of the Mayan and Vedic calendars, where there's some kind of alignment of earth sun, and the galactic center


oh ... ray says there are 3.6 million pictures of cats online ...

Maya, Illusion, Enlightenment, Photography.

Maya (Sanskrit), in Hinduism, is a term describing many things. Maya is the phenomenal world of separate objects and people, which creates for some the illusion that it is the only reality. For the mystics this manifestation is real, but it is a fleeting reality; it is a mistake, although a natural one, to believe that maya represents a fundamental reality. Each person, each physical object, from the perspective of eternity is like a brief, disturbed drop of water from an unbounded ocean. The goal of enlightenment is to understand this ~”more precisely, to experience this: to see intuitively that the distinction between the self and the universe is a false dichotomy. The distinction between consciousness and physical matter, between mind and body, is the result of an unenlightened perspective. [adapted from the Wikipedia article]

something to explore as well is nonattachment
One of the ways out might be ... to take the right kind of pictures ....

Modeling the Hes1 Oscillator.

OK, so what's new in the Nonlinear Medicine / Biology arena? Plenty but this struck my fancy for a totally nonlinear reason dealing with the difference between illusion and imagination ...

Zeiser S, Müller J, Liebscher V., Modeling the Hes1 Oscillator. [in J Comput Biol. 2007 Sep;14(7):984-1000]

GSF–National Research Centre for Environment and Health, Institute of Biomathematics and Biometry, Oberschleißheim, Germany.

Somitogenesis describes the segmentation of vertebrate embryonic bodies, which is thought to be induced by ultradian clocks (i.e., clocks with relatively short cycles compared to circadian clocks). One candidate for such a clock is the bHLH factor Hes1, forming dimers which repress the transcription of its own encoding gene. Most models for such small autoregulative networks are based on delay equations where a Hill function represents the regulation of transcription. The aim of the present paper is to estimate the Hill coefficient in the switch of an Hes1 oscillator and to suggest a more detailed model of the autoregulative network. The promoter of Hes1 consists of three to four binding sites for Hes1 dimers. Using the sparse data from literature, we find, in contrast to other statements in literature, that there is not much evidence for synergistic binding in the regulatory region of Hes1, and that the Hill coefficient is about three. As a model for the negative feedback loop, we use a Goodwin system and find sustained oscillations for systems with a large enough number of linear differential equations. By a suitable variation of the number of equations, we provide a rational lower bound for the Hill coefficient for such a system. Our results suggest that there exist additional nonlinear processes outside of the regulatory region of Hes1.

PMID: 17803375 [Via PubMed]

tracking technorati on illusions ... "Illusion"


talking about Illusions ... here's an optical illusion blog ... definitely worth a link [did you know that Al Seckel wrote "The Ultimate Book of Optical Illusions"?]

Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way - Dance Tour '97

This FMAC gis is pretty awesome too ...



[from Fleetwood Mac - Go Your Own Way - Dance Tour '97]

technorati Nonlinear link

Its really amazing how few technorati Nonlinear links are really connected to Nonlinearity! Overspam I guess ... maybe its the way of the future ... maybe its always been this way bit we just couldn't measure it ...

Journaling on the Edge

Wide Open: Inspiration & Techniques for Art Journaling on the Edge by Randi Feuerhelm-Watts is getting some notice ... the approach ... "Each card in this inspiring deck offers an idea to stretch your approach to observing and chronicling the daily events around you. You'll learn how to harness the power of words (what to write about, and what to write with), explore extreme photography techniques without having any previous photography experience, focus on the little things (like a two-inch section of a painted mural you drive by every day), and discover unusual ways to create a self-portrait (from plastic wrap and tree lights, to close-ups of your hands)." turns out to be embraced by quite a few folks ...

Civilization of Illiteracy

The Civilization of Illiteracy by Mihai Nadin

definitely manifestation of nonlinearity ...

Dresden University Press (February 1998) - interesting to see this pop up ... it would be nice to see this in a more affordable format ... but ... hey nonlinear euros?

Totally Nonlinear Uplift - Don't stop (thinking about tomorrow)

Totally Nonlinear Uplift

Fleetwood Mac - Don't stop (thinking about tomorrow)



absolutely!

Elegance, Patents

OK ... so two things to add for sure are separate threads for Elegance and Google Patents. Today we'll just start with another Google Patent thread. These are quite nonlinear to almost anything else.

By the way ... thinking of nonlinear ... there's of course the undefined non-linear, defined only by not being linear, but there are defined non-linear things -- like elliptic, parabolic, hyperbolic, and other well structured patterns. We'll have to deal with these separately

The Google Patent Monitor is ON!

Nonlinear Aging - Staying Positive

So here

Photo Musings

Photomusings is an interesting Photography Blog ... we'll add that to the visit list.

Black and White Photography Blog is interesting too

Lage Raho Munna Bhai

Did you know that Lage Raho Munna Bhai "is the third top grossing Bollywood film of the 21st century, according to boxofficeindia.com"? The Wikipediat article describes the Rajkumar Hirani directed / Vidhu Vinod Chopra produced film as "a 2006 Indian musical comedy film ... Sanjay Dutt stars in this film as Munna Bhai, a Mumbai (Bombay) underworld don, who begins to see the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi. Through his interactions with the image of Gandhi, Munna Bhai begins to practice what he calls Gandhigiri (Satyagraha, non-violence, and truth) to help ordinary people solve their problems. His sidekick, Circuit, is portrayed by Arshad Warsi."

Apparently this led to a surgence/resurgence of Gandhism now rebuzzed as Gandhigiri

Be Positive, Always

Be Positive, Always! I am positive ...
I'm also positive Liflab has an interesting Blog ... it has this Swiss flavor to it though .... this COULD be a good thing

Nonlinear Mind

A mind that flits easily from one thought to the next may not be good at mastering the material for a biology test, but the authors contend that a nonlinear mind can excel at combining ideas in new ways.

[from here , a commentary on Anne Underwood's book, via Swampfox Insights on The Gift of ADHD]

This of course led nonlinearly to the post about Innoventure and Capital Insights. And, by the way, Seth Godin's piece about business card mistakes is really interesting and eye opening ... just haven't thought about that in that much detail

Motoring right along

Yup, motoring right along .... what did they say before motors were around? Galloping right along, I guess cruising would work since it doesn't imply any specific technology.

Irises, Roses, Star Gazer Lillies

Flowers are pretty nonlinear, in being and effect ...

beautiful to look at and smell .... and appreciate