2007-02-23

Woman Wins Turing Award

When a co-worker first sent this to me, I thought the point was that a woman has passed the Turing test, convincing the referee that she was not a computer! (or something like that. What would it mean if a human *failed* the Turing test?)

2007-02-10

Following the obvious

Atheists refuse to believe in God for lack of evidence.

Well, to be hard-nosed about it, all there's evidence for is awareness and its contents. There's no way to tell whether the story told by the stream of images, smells, sounds, thoughts, and emotions that pass through awareness have any correspondence with any "external" reality.

Thoughts about "I" or "me" are just thoughts in the stream. They have no more evidence backing them up than any of of the other thoughts or impressions that flow through.

There's no telling where the objects in awareness come from -- they simply seem to arise, have their moment on the stage, and pass away.

2007-02-07

"90 percent more energy than it consumed"

First I read it on slashdot and thought, "Surely they got the quote wrong."

So I went to Purdue's website and found the claim in the very words quoted on slashdot.

The idea of an electrical generator running off trash is great. I'd even settle for one that produces 90 percent of the energy it consumes. If we have a machine that produces 90 percent more energy than it consumes, we have a way of getting free energy and it's time to rewrite all the text books cause it sounds like Purdue has found a way to reverse entropy.

Commenters on slashdot hypothesize that this statement means that the electrical energy produced is equivalent to 1.9 times the energy injected into the system at the beginning in the form of diesel fuel. But the way it's stated in the original news release does sound like a violation of the second law. I like that interpretation better.