CapitalistImperialistPig

Attack of the Sexbots Sensation mongering quote from the Sunday Times: “People are going to be having sex with robots within five years,” That's not all, it seems. THE race is on to keep humans one step ahead of robots: an international team of scientists and academics is to publish a “code of ethics” for machines as they become more and more sophisticated. Although the nightmare vision of a Terminator world controlled by machines may seem fanciful, scientists believe the boundaries for human-robot interaction must be set now — before super-intelligent robots develop beyond our control. “There are two levels of priority,” said Gianmarco Verruggio, a roboticist at the Institute of Intelligent Systems for Automation in Genoa, northern Italy, and chief architect of the guide, to be published next month. “We have to manage the ethics of the scientists making the robots and the artificial ethics inside the robots.” Verruggio and his colleagues have identified key areas that include: e...

OK, so I'll shut up for a while.

Mark of Cosmic Variance ran a little contest to come up with the top ten reasons to study physics (aside from becoming a professional physicist). He and his commenters came up with some good ones, but I'm not sure they got the big one. A (then) senior I know at a top physics factory was taking General Relativity, Quantum Field Theory, and String Theory. Since he had already told me he had no intention of going on in physics, I asked: why those courses? His answer: "because those are supposed to be the hardest courses they teach here." The answer makes more sense to me now than it did then. It's natural for young people to test themselves, and for a purely intellectual test, it's hard to beat physics. Top employers like to hire physics graduates of top schools not because it has taught them to think, but because success in a physics degree is evidence of high intelligence.

Evidence continues to accumulate that the Republican House Leadership has run the joint as a criminal conspiracy. Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert is the latest guy implicated in graft. Josh Marshall has a link to the Chicago Tribune story by James Kimberly and Andrew Zajac detailing the scheme. The complex structure of a real estate transaction in Kendall County last December left House Speaker Dennis Hastert with a seven-figure profit and in prime position to reap further benefits as the exurban region west of Chicago continues its prairie-fire growth boosted by a Hastert-backed federally funded proposed highway. Instead of cash, Hastert (R-Ill.) took most of his share of the proceeds in land, some of it less than 2 miles from the parcels he and two partners in a land trust sold for nearly $5 million to a developer who plans to build more than 1,500 homes and commercial space on the property near Little Rock and Galena roads in Plano. Hastert received five-eighths of the proce...

This post was supposed to be about Ghana's astonishing and beautiful victory over the Czech Republic in the World Cup, but thanks to Wolfgang , it must be about something else. Wolfgang says: I happen to agree with a lot of what Lubos writes ..., and cites the following as an example (I have numbered the paragraphs for reference): #1) I am not so much concerned about the future of any funding because I am leaving Academia soon and I never cared about money much anyway. #2) Moreover, I am also a leading expert in loop quantum gravity so that switching funding to LQG would not affect me even if this question were relevant. ;-) #3) What I am primarily concerned about are aggressive crackpots who have no idea what they're talking about and who attempt to distort science as such and force scientists to share their idiotic beliefs, just like the religious bigots in the 16th century wanted to stop scientists from doing their work, and sometimes they did so rather efficiently. #4) So...

The environmental impact of a person living a typical first world lifestyle is about 32 times as great as that of a person living a third world lifestyle. This factor is a kind of average over resource consumption, pollution generated, and other effects. Economists like to claim that the Earth can sustain many more people than it now has, but of course such claims are based on low impact lifestyles (when not pulled from thin air). (Numbers from Jared Diamond's Collapse ) The trouble is that people living in third world conditions aspire to the first world lifestyle. If a magic wand, or rapid economic progress made such possible, the net human impact on the environment would increase 12 fold. Nobody thinks this is possible in any kind of reasonable timeframe. There is simply not 12 times as much oil production, or 12 times as much copper available. There is no plausible way the world's food production can increase by a factor of 12, and no likelyhood that our ecosystems cou...

Is blogging a bad career move? No doubt it depends on the career, but there are certainly a whole range of careers where it can be bad for you. Academics traditionally have a lot of leeway to write and speak out, but maybe keeping a weblog is just too out. The first academic weblog I read with any regularity was Sean Carroll's Preposterous Universe . Sean is a popular teacher, much in demand for both popular and technical lectures, and the author of an important textbook on general relativity. He seemed to be compiling a solid research reputation. It was a shock then, to his readers as well as to him when he was denied tenure at the University of Chicago. Untenured professors are traditionally expected to keep their heads down, their noses to the grindstone, and keep cranking out influential papers. Another favorite web log I read is Juan Cole's. He is a tenured professor at his university, but was recently refused appointment at Yale after recommendation by the department...