Month: August 2007
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The Amazing Randi
I went to a talk by James Randi yesterday. He used to perform magic as the Amazing Randi, although at 78 and recovering from a double bypass, he said he now merely aspires to be the Mildly Astonishing Randi. He is of course best known as a debunker of paranormal claims (though he said that…
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Conscious Computers
The New York Times magazine last Sunday had an article on social robots: work, mostly at M.I.T., on robots which interact with humans. They interact in very very simple ways. But since we naturally impute agency to almost anything possible–e.g., the weather–it doesn’t take much for us humans to be convinced that there is really…
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Media Monopoly
The current media news is about Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the Wall Street Journal. I don’t happen to read the Wall Street Journal. And newspaper readership is declining overall. So I think it is fair to ask: does this purchase really matter? Is the media spending a lot of time on it because it is…
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Creating Reality
My original plan for this blog has evidently flagged. I find myself often thinking of things I would like to write about, but I’m not making the time to actually write them. I’m switching to a new plan. My goal now is to write a new post every day (perhaps every weekday), writing for about…