Andart - Anders Sandberg's Blog
Another lobe of Anders Sandberg's distributed brain: essays on technology, science and the human condition.
Updated: 12 weeks 4 days ago
Whole Brain Emulation: The Logical Endpoint of Neuroinformatics?
I haven't been updating for a while, due to a California trip. Here is one result, a talk I held at Google about brain emulation:...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Guided by drugs and P2P
Today we lost the drug war - an essay inspired by Quinn Norton's blog on drug production using synthetic biology. I suggest that we can use what we have (expensively) learned from the drug war and the growth of Internet...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Squid squick
A steamy calamari: trans-species eroticism and disgust (Practical Ethics) - I wrestle with the question of what (if anything) is wrong with dead squid porn. I mainly conclude that we shouldn't trust immediate disgust reactions. In fact, dead squid porn...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Accidental poetry
Reality just is. Right now cherry trees flower outside my window. A hangnail hurts. A dust cloud might mess up my flight to America, or it might not. People are suffering and enjoying. The ideal gas law follows from Stirling's...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Yes, a long life is worth it
On Practical Ethics in the News I argue that life extension is worth it. It is quite surprising how many people are taken in with grand pronouncements that pursuing life extension will lead to bad consequences X, Y and Z...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Life Extension
Functions!
NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions is a newly online published companion to the NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions. Wow! This got everything from obscure special functions to Laplace transforms of matrices to very useful numerical methods. A great resource!...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Everyday chemical warfare
I just finished reading For Love of Insects by Thomas Eisner. A very enjoyable book about how insects defend themselves chemically (or otherwise), from the explosive compounds of bombardier beetles over prey management strategies among spiders to the chains of...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Boobday statistics
Just a quick exercise with Matlab and the USGS earthquake data to check whether the boobquake experiment did produce extra earthquakes. The answer is no. Here are the earthquakes in the period 2010/04/20 09:57:38 to 2010/04/27 09:31:10, plotted by latitude...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
A sense of proportion
This Saturday I spoke at Humanity+ UK2010. Great fun as always when you put a lot of future oriented big thinkers in close vicinity. I think the morning session was all about complexity and adaptation: Max More explained what he...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Distributed cognition
Anders Sandberg on Neuroselves and exoselves: distributed cognition inside and outside brains - a recording of my talk I gave on Sunday the 18th in Teleplace. Given that I had some connection problems (do not trust your wireless to handle...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Free the data
Practical Ethics: I'm a taxpayer, I want my data! - I blog about the ethics of having researchers release their data to the public. Since I think science is a fundamentally collective activity that really requires independent (and often adversarial)...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Flanders vs. Fermi
Why We Haven't Met Any Aliens by Geoffrey Miller in Seed Magazine has a nice essay about one explanation for the Fermi paradox: Life evolves to make use of indirect cues of fitness rather than fitness itself: it is not...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Human development
Zoom into the Mercator Mandelbrot
Makc just made a flash Mandelbrot zoomer using my Mercator Mandelbrot images. This is a cool hack; since the zoom is precomputed it is fast, and now the set has gone from Cartesian to polar to Cartesian again. There...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Ethicists analysing ethicists analysing themselves
Practical Ethics: Experience and self-experimentation in ethics - an essay where I consider whether the fact that I have used cognition enhancers renders me more or less suitable to discuss their ethics. My view is that bias cannot be avoided,...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
The food is growing on the plates
Here is a fun use of image processing: checking trends in how portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have changed. International Journal of Obesity - The largest Last Supper: depictions of food portions and plate size increased over...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Reporting Risks
WEF Risks 2010: an interactive map of risks, as analysed by the World Economic Forum 2010 (report (pdf) here). As infographics goes this is pretty nice. One gets an overview of what is linked to what, the estimated likelihood, severity...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
More cognition enhancement in the media
The Daily Mail has had an article on cognition enhancers, with their typical slant: Illegal 'smart drugs' bought online by teenagers before exams could have catastrophic effect on their health. Unsurprisingly taking a lot of stimulants and not sleeping is...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
To survive one's profession
I discuss the future of youth unemployment in Kvällsposten: Att Överleva Sitt Yrke (in Swedish). My main point is that demographic change leads to differences in what jobs and careers mean: less transfer of wealth from older generations to younger,...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
Corrupting the Youth
I am in the Oxford student newspaper: Uni scientist advocates smart drugs for students - OK, they sexed up the title a bit, since my long list of ethical and practical caveats would have made a lousy title ("Uni scientist...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
The sun rises more surely with Jeffreys than Laplace
The sunrise problem is one of the perennial problems of probability and particularly relevant for the research we do at FHI: how do we estimate a probability for something we have never seen? The "classic" solution is Laplace's rule of...
Anders3
http://www.aleph.se/
asa@nada.kth.se
