Das Buch erzählt mit mehr Details und Hintergründen den Inhalt dieser Lecture – sehr bewegend ist sein Einsatz und seine Einsichten aus und in seinem Leben.

Zitate:

“Wenn Du es träumen kannst, dann kannst du es auch tun.”

“Mein Vater hat mir beigebracht: Wenn ein Elefant im Raum ist, stelle ihn vor. Wenn man sich mein CT ansieht, dann sieht man ungefähr zehn Tumore in meiner Leber und die Ärzte sagten mir, dass ich noch drei bis sechs Monate bei guter Gesundheit hätte. Das war vor einem Monat, also rechnet selbst.”

“‘Coach Graham hat dich ziemlich hart angepackt, was?’ …. ‘Das ist gut’, erklärte er mir, ‘denn wenn du es verbockst und niemand etwas sagt, dann heisst das, dass sie dich aufgegeben haben.’”

“Ich habe schon so oft Klagen über den Niedergang unseres Bildungssystems gehört, aber ich bin überzeugt, dass einer der Schlüsselfaktoren dabei die viel zu vielen Streicheleinheiten und viel zu wenigen echten Feedbacks sind.”

“Sie sagte: ‘Es hat lange gedauert, aber am Ende hab ich es doch rausbekommen. Wenn es um Männer geht, die ein romantisches Interesse an dir zeigen, ist die Sache wirklich einfach: Ignoriere alles, was sie sagen und achte nur darauf, was sie tun.’”

“Erfahrung ist das, was du bekommst, wenn du nicht bekommen hast, was du wolltest. Und Erfahrung ist nicht selten das Wertvollste, was du anzubieten hast.”

“… die Idee, jedem Papier, das zur Begutachtung anstand, eine Schachtel Girl Scout Thin Mints beizulegen. ‘Danke für Deine Bereitschaft’, schrieb ich dazu. ‘Die beigefügten Thin Mints sind Deine Belohnung. Aber nicht drüber hermachen, bevor Du das Papier begutachtet hast.’ Das brachte die Leute zum Lächeln. Und ich brauchte sie nie anzurufen und ihnen auf die Nerven zu gehen. Sie hatten die Schachtel Thin Mints auf dem Schreibtisch und wussten, was sie zu tun hatten.
Klar, manchmal musste ich eine kurze Erinnerungsmail schicken. Doch auch da brauchte ich nur einen Satz zu schreiben: ‘Hast Du Deine Thin Mints schon gegessen?’”

She starts out by talking about evolution being a ‘must’ given variation, selection and heredity – and certainly this shouldn’t be seen restricted to biological evolution (i.e. on the gene level). Memetics talks about a second type of replicator having taken its place in our world – the world of copyable ideas, ‘living’ and fighting for resources in our brains.

New replicators can be dangerous – as they ‘care’ only for themselves and can come into conflict with the goals of the substrate brains (think suicide memes in some religions for example).

She then brings on the ideas of a third type of replicator – technical memes, or temes, being memes which do not anymore depend on us – and use us to spread only in the sense that they (at least still at the moment) need us to create their infrastructure, e.g. the internet. In not too long a time these could get independent from us … and for example the destruction of the environment would possibly be not important to them.

Two possible roads exist for her: we integrate with these temes (think cyborg), or they will do without us.

Next and finally she draws the arc to extraterrestrial life: looking at Drake’s equation she proposes that it might be more important to look at replicators rather than intelligence and then the corresponding equation would contain in her view the probabilities for getting a first, second and third replicator anywhere – and surviving this process.

Fascinating ideas.

See the paper by Mark Changizi “Latency correction and a general theory of illusions”.

Let me die a young man’s death

Let me die a young man’s death,
not a clean and in between
the sheets holywater death,
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death.

When I’m 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party.

Or when I’m 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber’s chair,
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides.

Or when I’m 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one.

Let me die a youngman’s death,
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death,
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
‘what a nice way to go’ death.

---

Roger McGough.
(from http://scalabledeficit.blogspot.com/2006/07/let-me-die-young-mans-death.html)

Link: http://tedtalks.podzinger.com/results.jsp?filter=0&q=david+deutsch&s=PZSID_videopods_videopod0_8_5_0008&col=en-all-pod-ep

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

Incantation of the Bene Gesserit (Frank Herbert’s Dune)
in Wikipedia

It contains Brians perspective of the Long Now (and the Big Here), some discussion about his music and especially also his studies for a bell for the Long Now clock (see http://www.longnow.org/shop/prints-cds/bells-cd.php). He mentions how the long-term thinking is influencing his life.

Neat thoughts from the lecture:

• an example of long-term thinking in the past: 500 years ago the builders of the ‘New College’ in Oxford already thought about the time (now), when the oak beams supporting the ceiling of the building would have to be replaced – they already planted new oaks at the time of building …
• talking about the feeling of helplessness of people in these days: create a book ‘250 projects for a better future’ with one-page ideas. Big ones like desalination, or local ones like how to help old people in local community.
• what did the Long Now change for your life? The long-term perspective takes a whole lot of pressure out of ones life.
• how to focus on the Long Now? As experiment/discussion think about what we/you would do, if we would for certain have only 1 day, 1 week, 1 month, 1 year more to live. Then also consider, if you would live for 1000 years.

It is available at their site as PDF and as recording (see http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/).

Jihadists are strapping on suicide bombs today, in the hope of attaining the kind of environment that virtual reality will deliver in 20 years.

The promises of religion, of paradise etc could become real through sweeping technological changes of our world (aka Singularity). As the people obviously are looking to these promises (proven by the followers of the religions), they will strive for that goal in reality if at all possible!

What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?’

He mentions that this will include getting rid of thank-you notes etc. which in effect might the world a bit darker. Still, for the ambitious this is a good question!

For 30 years I have been wondering, what indication of its existence might we expect from a true AI? Certainly not any explicit revelation, which might spark a movement to pull the plug. Anomalous accumulation or creation of wealth might be a sign, or an unquenchable thirst for raw information, storage space, and processing cycles, or a concerted attempt to secure an uninterrupted, autonomous power supply. But the real sign, I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn’t be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings:
“When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain.”

Indeed … and even more provoking, this is said in the context of a description of his visit to Google headquarters.

• Quest for fundamental understanding, and
• Considerations of use

Pure and base research (Niels Bohr is the quoted name here) is looking for fundamental understanding, but not considering use. Pure applied research as Edison did considers mainly the use, but is not looking for fundamental understanding. He argues to look more for research in the quadrant looking both at use and fundamental understanding – and name Pasteur as an example for a researcher in that quadrant.

For a much better description, see Completing the Bush Mode: Pasteur’s Quadrant by Donald Stokes.

[1] Donald E. Stokes: Pasteur’s Quadrant. Basic Science and Technological Innovation, Brookings Institution Press (September, 1997)

1. Vergleiche anzustellen ist ein gutes Mittel, um sich sein Glück zu vermiesen.
2. Glück kommt oft überraschend.
3. Viele Leute sehen ihr Glück nur in der Zukunft
4. Viele Leute denken, dass Glück bedeutet, recher oder mächtiger zu sein.
5. Manchmal bedeutet Glück, etwas nicht zu begreifen.
6. Glück, das ist eine gute Wanderung inmitten schöner unbekannter Berge.
7. Es ist ein Irrtum zu glauben, Glück wäre das Ziel.
8. Glück ist, mit den Menschen zusammen zu sein, die man liebt. Unglück ist, von den Menschen, die man liebt, getrennt zu sein.
9. Glück ist, wenn es der Familie an nichts mangelt.
10. Glück ist, wenn man eine Beschäftigung hat, die man liebt.
11. Glück ist, wenn man ein Haus und einen Garten hat.
12. Glück ist schwieriger in einem Land, das von schlechten Leuten regiert wrid.
13. Glück ist, wenn man spürt, dass man den anderen nützlich ist.
14. Glück ist, wenn man dafÜr geliebt wird, wie man eben ist. Anmerkung: Zu einem lächelnden Kind ist man freundlicher (sehr wichtig)
15. Glück ist, wenn man sich rundum lebendig fühlt.
16. Glück ist, wenn man richtig feiert. Frage: Ist Glück vielleicht einfach eine chemische Reaktion im Gehirn?
17. Glück ist, wenn man an das Glück der Leute denkt, die man liebt.
18. [Glück wäre, wenn man mehrere Frauen gleichzeitig lieben könnte.]
19. Sonne und Meer sind ein Glück für alle Menschen.
20. Glück ist eine Sichtweise auf die Dinge.
21. Rivalität ist ein schlimmes Gift für das Glück.
22. Frauen achten mehr auf das Glück der anderen als Männer.
23. Bedeutet Glück, dass man sich um das Glück der anderen kümmert?

The author of this paper goes one step further and adds the human color vision system with the three different color receptors (cones) to the picture. Due to this restriction to three types, there is the possibility for metamers, i.e. different mixes of light frequencies leading to the same color as perceived by the human eye. An example is the mixing of red and green light resulting in a perceived yellow exactly like the single frequency yellow light.
Armed with that background, he tries to identify a simple frequency spectrum which will be perceived the same as the frequency spectrum resulting from the sun and Rayleigh scattering. As model he adds a very narrow frequency range to a background of white light of all frequencies. Fitting the frequency of the narrow band to result in the same perceived color, one gets a background of white light with a narrow blue frequency range – corresponding to unsaturated blue. Ergo, we see the sky as blue not violet!
Nice paper and very readable!

For me, I recognized another important thing: one usually says that all colors are in the rainbow – but this is not true! Due to the fact that there are three different types of color receptors, a small frequency range will always produce some special combination of responses from the three receptor types – but not all possible combinations. For example: with a small frequency range, one cannot excite the low and the high frequency receptors without the medium frequency receptor.
But with a suitable mixture of various light frequencies I can get any combination of responses from the three types. I.e. there are many more perceived colors than the rainbow contains!

Corollary: for color blind people with only two types of color receptors the rainbow indeed contains all possible perceived colors.

Reference:

Smith, G.S. 2005. Human color vision and the unsaturated blue color of the daytime sky. American Journal of Physics 73(July):590-597. Abstract available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1119/1.1858479.

“Intelligent design” boils down to the claim sarcastically summed up by aerospace engineer and science consultant Rand Simberg on his blog, Transterrestrial Musings: “I’m not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer.”

Simberg, a political conservative, concludes that this argument “doesn’t belong in a science classroom, except as an example of what’s not science.”