Category "Singularity"
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Steam Locomotives, Entropy, Information and Data Science
This is the first in series of short photo blog posts discussing the ideas of Carl Sagan (and others) relating civilization, energy, and information. Let’s start of by discussing entropy (energy), thermodynamics and information. There are multiple links (thermodynamics species a minimum amount of energy usage required for computation). The first one we’re interested in here is due to MIT professor Claude Shannon. Prof. Shannon provided the mathematical foundations relating information, data science, and thermodynamics. Specifically, his mathematical formulation for information is identical to that of negative entropy. (Entropy, sometimes confused with the similar concept of energy or rather energy gradients, is the disorder in the universe. You can think of it as the useable energy available. We’ll come to the steam locomotives in the photo in a bit.) There’s another relationship as well: it takes energy to perform computation, and there is a thermodynamic minimum on the amount of energy necessary for computation.… Read the restAnimal consciousness: is this bird human-like?
Does this bird have levels of animal consciousness comparable to a human? Unlike the ‘bird brained’ giant chicken we featured in our last post (aka the dinosaur T-rex), this Eurasian magpie has one of the highest brain/body ratios, comparable to a gorilla. Magpies are reputed for their intelligence. (They taunt other animals and are so famed for stealing shiny objects the Italian composer Rossini wrote an opera about them, “The Thieving Magpie.”) The Ted talk linked from our post on the singularity talks about brain/body ratios. Metabolism slows down in larger organisms to reduce heat dissipation, which is why it is the brain/body ratio that determines intelligence, not the size of the brain. (T-rex had a huge brain but there are all sorts of indications it was incredibly stupid despite being one of the smarter dinosaurs. It’s brain/body ratio was incredibly tiny.) Magpies are one of only about ten animals know for certain to be able to recognize themselves in a mirror (Wikipedia: mirror test).… 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 restMandelbrot set: cellular automatons & fractal islands
Mandelbrot set: fractal math. After spending some time in space, we wanted to come back down to Earth. Continuing on our previous photos, should we talk about Conquistador economics or the invention of writing and 3,000 year-old Chinese sunspot observations? First let’s talk about von Neumann machines and cellular automatons. This is the famous Mandelbrot set, an image generated from pure mathematics. There are an infinite number of beautiful images inside the Mandelbrot set. The Mandelbrot set isn’t normally constructed as a cellular automaton (although it certainly can be as cellular automatons are Turing-complete for the computer scientists out there.) However, many other famous fractals are easily expressed as cellular automatons. The two fields are closely related, as many fractals (including Mandelbrot) are related to bifurcation problems on recursive functions (famously related to automaton simulations). We’ll just note for now that Cellular Automatons are another name for von Neumann machines, which you may remember from Arthur C.… Read the restRecent Comments
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