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M-104

Last seen: 7 months ago

Kazuo is a 18 year old guy from Santa Rosa, CALIFORNIA, USA

"The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." - Douglas Adams ---- I post to this blog occasionally, time permitting, with a mixture of some miscellaneous stumbles and a selection of the more serious and relevant things I read. At the moment I remain stuck in an awkward stage where I know what, once I've acquired enough knowledge, to throw every ounce of my intellectual strength at (artificial intelligence research), yet still have to make my way through the slow and inflexible institutions of high school and university education. So long as I'm in this position there's little value (at present) in spending every available hour poring over books on probability theory, programming and cognitive science. My stumbling reflects this, and will for the next several months.

  • Wolfram|Alpha

    Reviewed May 19 2009 • 1 review • mathematics, web tools, physics • wolframalpha.com

    I can't believe nobody has added this to SU yet - Wolfram|Alpha promises to be for quick computation and knowledge-base lookup what Google's search engine has become for web pages. I'm impressed by the flexibility of what you can enter into the input text bar.

  • Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides and John...

    Rated Mar 27 2009 • 20 reviews • evolution, psychology • ucsb.edu

    A nice, thorough introduction to evolutionary psychology. Please disregard the negative reviews here; EP follows logically from the well-established conclusion that natural selection produced us as a species. I'm pretty sure that the typical complaint of "it's all just misogynistic bullshit" stems from a depressingly stupid mistake of failing to distinguish a theory which explains a phenomenon (a statement of how) from an endorsement of that phenomenon (a statement of should.)

  • Multiple Fluid Simulation

    Rated Mar 05 2009 • 106 reviews • physics, java • googlepages.com

    Hm.. interesting little fluid simulator.

  • Light Lane - Concept from Altitude's Alex Tee and Evan...

    Rated Feb 21 2009 • 4 reviews • bicycling, safety • wordpress.com

    Definitely an interesting product concept. As I bike to and from school on a regular basis (sometimes heading home after my evening class rather late), I'm well aware that drivers aren't always watching out for cyclists in the dark.

    But would this be a cost-effective improvement over your typical seat-mounted blinking light and well-placed reflectors? Quite possibly - as long as the laser is bright enough. And the two can be used in conjunction anyway.

  • Overcoming Bias : Write Your Hypothetical Apostasy

    Rated Feb 21 2009 • 1 review • self improvement • overcomingbias.com

    Nick Bostrom proposes a technique for being critical of your own views: write a hypothetical "I no longer hold this view" declaration aimed at a jury of your past selves. It's an interesting idea - I might just try this technique when the need arises.

    What I find interesting about it is that, in an upload society, it would likely be feasible to actually present such a hypothetical apostasy to a jury of your past selves. One need only make occasional backup copies of oneself and un-freeze them when a sufficiently important "crisis of faith" situation arises. Of course, to bridge the gap between past selves and the present self, it would be preferable to not bring back the jury from too long ago. Mind grafts a la Diaspora (by Greg Egan) seem unlikely to work between significantly different personalities. But I'm doing little more than speculation here; such a method may not even be necessary in a highly advanced society of machine minds.

  • Magenta Aint A Colour

    Rated Feb 20 2009 • 36 reviews • cognitive science, science • biotele.com

    I won't thumb this one down like some other reviewers have, since it seems to be an innocent case of misplaced emphasis. Both this page and the Ars Technica article purporting to correct it recognize the same thing; what we call "color" is a property of the behavior of our brains in response to mixtures of different wavelengths in the light which strikes our retinas.


    Now, as for that funky optical illusion down at the bottom of the page, I think that's caused by our ability to automatically filter out irrelevant stimulus. Notice that some of the brightest red splotches remain visible even after staring at the central black dot for a good half-minute.

  • antipsychiatry: MFI Ray Alert: Another Forced Shock...

    Reviewed Feb 19 2009 • 4 reviews • civil liberties • livejournal.com

    While the closing lines in the article border on sensationalism, this is absolutely appalling. I had no idea forced electroshock therapy is still done - much less legally allowed. Few crimes are worse than doing physical damage to someone's mind - in the name of treatment, no less - without their permission.

  • http://img.visualizeus.com/thumbs/09/01/03/quote,typograp...

    Reviewed Feb 19 2009 • 472 reviews • photography, quotes • visualizeus.com

    Surprisingly enough, this actually describes my current social situation pretty well. My friends are generally too preoccupied joking around and/or having ridiculous conversations (alternately having intelligent discussions about various stuff) to worry about interpersonal drama.

    Oh, and it's just plain good advice. And as for the "life's too short" part, we'll work on that.

  • Accelerating Future & Friendly AI - May I Check Your...

    Rated Feb 17 2009 • 2 reviews • ai • acceleratingfuture.com

    Another excellent blog post from Michael Anissimov concisely summarizing why we should care about artificial superintelligence - and why it's an extremely non-trivial problem to create one which upholds human morality.

    My main point of annoyance with this post is the "instant intelligence, just add computing power" tagline together with the suggestion that stable, recursively self-improving AI is all just a matter of getting to the point where we can run highly detailed brain simulations. Sorry, but there's no indication that it actually works that way; we've got to develop a rigorous mathematical model of general intelligence - you know, actually understand intelligence.

  • Tinmith Augmented Reality Project - Wearable Computer Lab

    Rated Feb 15 2009 • 115 reviews • computers, virtual reality • tinmith.net

    Interesting little augmented reality project.