Author Archives
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Problems with the Objective Function: the Monkey Pawn
Nick Bostrom, in a wonderful Ted Talk (below), muses about the problem of emerging superintelligence within the human society, so far calibrated to the distribution of biological brains. From the village idiot to Ed Witten. In “God and Golem”, Wiener evocatively… Read More ›
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Community life and chipped silicon
“If you open a modern computer case and stare at the mother board, it really appears like downtown Detroit” (the image above is aptly a painting by computer pioneer Konrad Zuse). This insightful comment by a friend of mine conceals… Read More ›
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Artificial Photosynthesis: some social implications of technology
The Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenathen invented the first historic monotheism, according to Freud’s Moses and Monotheismus (1939). Sensibly, the sun was the God, worshipped as the true generator of life in this planet. Everything we have depends on the constant flow… Read More ›
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Ipython: simple finite differences
Ipython as a prototyping tool for scientific computation is very neat and useful indeed. After the Win 8 minimal installation reviewed in a previous post, now we are going for some simple Crank Nicolson of a parabolic PDE. We are… Read More ›
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Ipython in Windows 8: “Hello World”
This post documents the installation of Ipython in Windows 8. As an example of Don Knuth’s Literate Programming, Ipython is simply great. One can devise the mathematical equations of a model, code the numerics and run the program against data.The… Read More ›
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Pythagorism for the masses: or the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος (John 1:1) The standard translation of the incipit of St. John Evangelion is: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word… Read More ›
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On Genes and Memes
Fact: “Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 850 individuals, of whom at least 22% (without peace prize over 24%) were Jews, although Jews comprise less than 0.2% of the world’s population.” (from this Wikipedia page) Explanation (Norbert Wiener): “He… Read More ›
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Wiener on learning & Gödel
This is a marvellous paper by former colleague of Norbert Wiener, N. Levinson. The bibliography of his papers is here. “It is no coincidence that my first childish essay into philosophy,written when I was in high school and not yet… Read More ›
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A. Burgess: “Clockwork Condition”. A tale on Skinner and Free Will
The real polemic target of Anthony Burgess in The Clockwork Condition (The New Yorker) (here the Italian translation) was Skinner and behaviorism. It reminds me of some studies of José Delgado, the brilliant physiologist who implanted electrodes in animal brains to… Read More ›
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Science Friction (1)
Mersenne numbers, when they are primes, are routinely used to feed MonteCarlo random number generation. They have the form: . Since not all of them are prime, we can use prime factorization of a sequence of big Mersenne numbers to… Read More ›
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