Earthquakes are almost impossible to predict. Luckily, engineers have come up with some amazing ways to protect people the next time one might strike.
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Continue reading “The Future of Earthquake-Proof Buildings” »
Researchers have found what may be the first-ever “virovore” or an organism which eats viruses. The study was published last week, in the PNAS journal by scientists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in the United States, which found two plankton organisms named Halteria and Paramecium, can not only feed on viruses but also thrive by consuming them.
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Irina Rish is a world-renowned professor of computer science and operations research at the Université de Montréal and a core member of the prestigious Mila organisation. She is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and the Canadian Excellence Research Chair in Autonomous AI. Irina holds an MSc and PhD in AI from the University of California, Irvine as well as an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the Moscow Gubkin Institute. Her research focuses on machine learning, neural data analysis, and neuroscience-inspired AI. In particular, she is exploring continual lifelong learning, optimization algorithms for deep neural networks, sparse modelling and probabilistic inference, dialog generation, biologically plausible reinforcement learning, and dynamical systems approaches to brain imaging analysis. Prof. Rish holds 64 patents, has published over 80 research papers, several book chapters, three edited books, and a monograph on Sparse Modelling. She has served as a Senior Area Chair for NeurIPS and ICML. Irina’s research is focussed on taking us closer to the holy grail of Artificial General Intelligence. She continues to push the boundaries of machine learning, continually striving to make advancements in neuroscience-inspired AI.
Continue reading “Prof. IRINA RISH — AGI, Complex Systems, Transhumanism #NeurIPS” »
Feat : hessid · zetno creato.
This is generated using Stable diffusion’s deforun model.
Via Masked Generative Transformers Presents Muse, a text-to-image Transformer model that achieves SotA image generation perf while being far more efficient than diffusion or AR models. proj: https://muse-model.github.io/ abs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.
I’ve looked at quite a few of the Planck base units, and I’ve even worked them out mathematically, but today I’m going to look at one of the derived units and I’ll compare it to some other things to see how big or small this is. Today then I’m going to be looking at the Planck Density. Let’s find out more.
Before we start, we need to know what density is. Density is a measure of how tightly packed a material is. In other words, how much stuff is packed into a certain volume of space.
To work out density then we need a formula, and units. To work out density we use the following formula, density and that is denoted by the greek letter rho equals mass divided by volume. The SI unit of density is kilograms per metre cubed. So now that we know what density is and we have our units, time to see how dense different materials are and then compare that to the Planck density, which is very dense indeed. At the end I’ll show you where the numbers come from. We’ll start off by looking at some very un dense things and work our way up.
Continue reading “The Planck Density: The Density of the Early Universe” »
Boltzmann brains are perhaps one of the spookiest ideas in physics. A Boltzmann brain is a single, isolated human brain complete with false memories that spontaneously fluctuates into existence from the void. They’re the kind of thing you’d find in a campfire horror story. The big problem, however, is that a range of plausible cosmological models (including our current cosmology) predict that Boltzmann brains will exist. Even worse, these brains should massively outnumber “ordinary” conscious observers like ourselves. At every moment of your existence, it is more likely that you are an isolated Boltzmann brain, falsely remembering your past, than a human being on a rocky planet in a low-entropy universe.
In this video I explain where the idea of Boltzmann brains originated, and why they haunt modern cosmology.
Continue reading “Boltzmann Brains: A Cosmological Horror Story” »
If you know anything about special relativity then you probably know that how fast you’re moving has an impact on how quickly time passes for you. What physics gives rise to this effect? Do you need to know some complicated mathematics in order to understand it?
It turns out that this effect, known as “time dilation”, can be very easily derived for a special kind of clock: a light clock. In this video, I consider a light clock moving through space and show how the postulates of special relativity entail that this moving clock runs slow.
Continue reading “The Light Clock: How Moving Clocks Run Slow” »
Quantum Hylomorphism
What is most original in Koons’s book is his argument that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as vindicating the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature. To be sure, there have been others who have made such claims, not the least of them being Werner Heisenberg, one of the fathers of modern quantum physics. But Koons is the first prominent philosopher to make the case at book-length, in a way that combines expertise in the relevant philosophical ideas and literature with serious and detailed engagement with the scientific concepts. Future work on hylomorphism and the philosophy of quantum mechanics will have to take account of his arguments.
As Koons notes, there are several aspects of quantum mechanics that lend themselves to an Aristotelian interpretation. For example, there is Heisenberg’s famous principle that the position and momentum of a particle are indeterminate apart from interaction with a system at the middle-range level of everyday objects (such as an observer). There is physicist Richard Feynman’s “sum over histories” method, in which predictions must take account of every possible path a particle might take, not just its actual path. There are “entanglement” phenomena, in which the properties of a system of particles are irreducible to the particles considered individually or their spatial relations and relative velocity. There is quantum statistics, in which particles of the same kind are treated as fused and losing their individuality within a larger system.
