Category "Digital Preservation"
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Superintelligence might be 40,000 years old?
10,000+ article views since 2015/06/27 Tim Berners-Lee’s corporations not the first forms of superintelligence? A topic that’s been retweeted by celebrity business leaders involves the prospect of a so-called artificial superintelligence on the horizon. This might be a boon to humanity or a terror, depending on who you read. Superintelligent artificial intelligence is related to the futurist and transhumanist concept of singularity. (So called because, as each generation of computers designs the next faster generation, technology and civilization shrinks under Moore’s law until vanishes into something like a black hole. Advancing towards the technological singularity is something of a Malthusian trap; fail and your civilization collapses violently (as we previously explored). It has been suggested that the technological singularity (together with convergent evolution) is the explanation for the Fermi Paradox. Superintelligence has been controversial of late as the topic of a bestselling book and rebuttals to it. Does the Singularity explain the Fermi Paradox?… Read the restT-Rex DNA Not digitally preserved: Why Jurassic Park Will Never Happen
Not digitally preserved: T-rex with feathers. We got lucky with our last two photos: Mammoths were in the news big today with a major find in Idaho (when this was originally published). Since we have DNA for many mammoth species (and elephants) we can use data science to study mammoths. Fans of the film Jurassic Park will be disappointed to learn that it looks like the same can never be said about T-rex DNA. The half-life of DNA is thought to be around 42,000 years, even in ice, whereas T-rex died out 60 million years ago, so all of its DNA is completely gone. Mammoths (and early humans like Neanderthals) have only been extinct for tens of thousands of years, so their DNA is still available for study. Why does it matter? There are tons of interesting questions about T-rex and dinosaurs that could best be solved by DNA. There’s the endless debate, for example, of whether T-rex as warmblooded or not-quite-warmblooded.… Read the restCaveman diet: data preservation of a woolly mammoth
No, this isn’t our sketch of an elephant. This is an 11,000-year old drawing by a Cro-Magnon prehistoric caveman (caveperson?) of a woolly mammoth in the Combarelles caves near Dordogne, France, as captured in the sketchbook of French archaeologist Joseph Déchelette (1862-1914). Apparently, this guy experienced the caveman diet and paleo diet first-hand. The gene sequences for the woolly mammoth and several related species have been available since 2008. Random gene drift is a type of molecular clock, and analysis of this genomic data allows the dating of the split between mammoths and African elephants. That happened six million years ago, around the time chimps split from what became humans. Mammoths did really well for a long time. They were imposing creatures, probably not easy to kill for most animals. Unfortunately, after six millions years, our ferocious ancestors’ hunting technology caught up to mammoths. (Unfortunately, the paleo and caveman diets weren’t too good from the perspective of the woolly mammoths.)… Read the restVR Data Preservation: Is this dutch masterpiece painting really a 400-year old photograph made by a human?
Coming back to our earlier posts on data modeling of the impacts of investment in world literacy (represented by another 400-year-old dutch masterpiece painting of a schoolhouse) and 3D-digital big data preservation of the Buddha destroyed by the Taliban (also related to literacy as we’ll discuss in the future), we wanted to circle back around and discuss just the data and Virtual Reality aspects of these dutch masterpieces themselves. Texas inventor Tim Jenison noticed that the Dutch master artist Vermeer had perfectly captured the pattern of light dappling in the background, although this cannot be seen by an unaided human eye. (Although you can see the light is dappled, your brain still reinterprets most of the shading as a flat surface with a single color, preventing you from seeing the subtle variations of grading. To get exact shades as perfect as in the painting, Jenison feels an optical device must have been used the obscures most of the image, so that each the shade in each ‘pixel’ can be matched exactly by the painter.… Read the restRecent Comments
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