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Best fucking article ever. The title says it all: “The Singularity“.

Across cultures, classes, and aeons, people have yearned to transcend death.

Bear that history in mind as you consider the creed of the singularitarians. Many of them fervently believe that in the next several decades we’ll have computers into which you’ll be able to upload your consciousness—the mysterious thing that makes you you. Then, with your consciousness able to go from mechanical body to mechanical body, or virtual paradise to virtual paradise, you’ll never need to face death, illness, bad food, or poor cellphone reception.

Now you know why the singularity has also been called the rapture of the geeks.

The singularity is supposed to begin shortly after engineers build the first computer with greater-than-human intelligence. That achievement will trigger a series of cycles in which superintelligent machines beget even smarter machine progeny, going from generation to generation in weeks or days rather than decades or years. The availability of all that cheap, mass-­produced brilliance will spark explosive economic growth, an unending, hypersonic, tech­no­industrial rampage that by comparison will make the Industrial Revolution look like a bingo game.

Lobster’s, here we come! (a reference to Accelerando by Charles Stross)

via BoingBoing (of course)

That ladies and gentlemen, is the surface of mars. The lander touched down minutes before this was taken.

I followed the hair-raising flight, atmospheric breaking, parachuting, and rocket firing landing of the Mars Phoenix Lander today via Twitter.

Science, it works bitches!

images via NASA

via Valleywag

A comment on the video reminds us that this video necessitates the importance of building EMP grenades when we are overtaken by robot overlords. Luckily the internet has all the knowledge we need on explosively pumped flux compression generators.

Number of locations on earth which can make 600 ton steel ingots: 1. How is that possible? I guess even in 2008 materials science pales in comparison with making massive blocks of steel.

The Japan Steel factory’s rusting, corrugated-metal warehouses, blackened by soot, belie the precision and patience required to fashion a 600-ton steel ingot into a tube with walls 30 centimeters (12 inches) thick. Blue-clad workers, some wearing balaclavas to keep warm, draw on knowledge built up when Japan Steel made the 18-inch gun barrel — the world’s largest at the time — for the World War II battleship Yamato. A 1945 attack on the Muroran plant killed more than 200 workers.

“Our accumulated technology for cannon barrels helped us make this technical breakthrough in forging,” plant manager Sato said.

The company’s basic product, steel of the highest quality, has the same enduring appeal as the samurai swords still fashioned in limited quantities by craftsmen at the plant.

15,000 Tons

To make the 600-ton ingot, workers heat steel scrap in an electric furnace to as high as 2,000 degrees Celsius (3,600 degrees Fahrenheit). Then they fill each of five giant ladles with 120 tons of the orange-hot molten metal. Argon gas is injected to eliminate impurities, and manganese, chromium and nickel are added to make the steel harder.

The mixture is poured into a blackened casing to form ingots 4.2 meters wide in the rough shape of a cylinder. Five times over three weeks, the ingots are pressed, reheated and re-pressed under 15,000 tons applied by a machine that rotates them gradually, making the floor tremble as it works.

The heavy forging is needed to make the steel uniformly strong by aligning the crystal lattices of atoms that make up the metal, known as the grain. In a casting, they would be jumbled.

It would take any competitor more than five years to catch up with Japan Steel’s technology, said the company’s chief executive officer, Masahisa Nagata.

via Bloomberg

Hate to see this thing pop out of a heating vent and have a laser sight aimed at your head.

Looks like we understand a little better how to optimize our biology, check out this article on mice that are basically Lance Armstrong on crack:

The mice over-express a gene responsible for the enzyme phosphoenolypyruvate carboxykinases (PEPCK-C). Normal expression is in the liver, in the production of glucose.

The scientists found their new mice would eat twice as much as normal mice – but weigh half as much. They could also give birth at three years old – which in human terms is akin to an 80-year-old woman giving birth.

via BBC NEWS

Demolish the moon! Hack the genome! Woo! Just what I needed on the day before Friday, some rigorous philosophical thinking.

The divide between the intellectually/physically rich and poor can only be closed if transhumanism is enacted uniformly. Unfortunately, the capitalist society in which we live most likely ensures that only the monetarily rich will benefit. Since money does not necessarily equate with moral goodness and intelligence, we are thus in dire straits as transhumanist ideology will quickly be abandoned in the pursuit of dominance and power. Therefore, transhumanism is probably the world’s most dangerous idea (Fukuyama, 2004). The potential for great evil is dizzying. Fortunately, the reverse is also true.

via Jotlab

Enough said.

I just finished reading this wonderful article entitled Science and the Islamic World. It examines the once rich Arabic scientific culture (alegrebra, optics, etc.) from antiquity, and how today’s Islamic culture has basically gone backward scientifically.

here are some incredible and very, very sad quotes from the article:

The situation regarding patents is also discouraging: The OIC [Organization of the Islamic Conference] countries produce negligibly few. According to official statistics, Pakistan has produced only eight patents in the past 43 years.

…

Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential. Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

…

According to a 2002 United Nations report written by Arab intellectuals and released in Cairo, Egypt, “The entire Arab world translates about 330 books annually, one-fifth the number that Greece translates.” The report adds that in the 1000 years since the reign of the caliph Maa’moun, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.