Dylan Hunter

Move over Intel, the days of silicon are numbered, the Borg a mere few decades away. Some excellent fodder for thinking further about the implications of cybernetics, as well as hopefully stimulating further discussions / experimentation as to whether sentience is something purely biological, (in which case, we’ll be creating sentient hybrids - low grade, to be sure, for quite some time, but still) or something else, now that the first combo brain cell / silicon circuit is finally a reality. Much more to come on this path to be sure, but plenty of excitement, (and pitfalls) ahead!

Now this looks like some fun, (and a _whole_ lot o’ work! :-0 ). Just joined today, and would encourage others to do the same, though one does have to wonder a good bit why they’re effectively starting from scratch in trying to determine the web of human knowledge when a whole ton of these kind of assertions / relationships could be preliminarily posited by crawling extant SE’s, Wikipedia, blogs & the whole host of Web 2.0 tagging-type apps, leaving users the far simpler option of just editing the relationships they’ve posited from analysis of these sources - ah well, s’pose that’s the difference between having all the cash and time in the world, and knowing that you’ve got 6 mths to pull something off, or you won’t be making the mortgage payment!

In any case, the concept’s certainly intriguing, at least, and if the method undertaken turns out to be too unwieldy, certainly a good chance that a startup could do as suggested above - anyone got a $1M burning a whole in their pocket?

Cambridge, Mass. — Japanese Computer manufacturer Toshiba and the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Monday announced a new collaboration, called the “GlobalMind Project,” a program intended “to bring cross-cultural common sense to computer systems.” Toshiba said that it hopes to explore new ways to give computers “human-like” understanding for applications such as Japanese text recognition and processing, car navigation, and robots. On MIT’s end, the program is being led by Professor Emeritus Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), and will include other Media Lab researchers.

Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamun’s was found in 1922.

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Now this is cool!

A new planet-hunting technique has detected the most Earth-like planet yet around a star other than our sun, raising hopes of finding a space rock that might support life, astronomers reported on Wednesday.

‘The team has discovered the most Earth-like planet yet, and more importantly, has demonstrated the power of a new technique that is sensitive to detecting habitable planets,’ Turner said in a statement.

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BTW - Doing this for a bit now, there’s definitely a fairly replicated pattern in most of these news stories - the lead paragraph is important, the first paragraph after is nigh-unto useless, and then go with the third - that’s it - another new search idea “FirstandThird.com” - indexing only those two paragraphs from every news story on the planet - who needs more?