Greenflame
Jottings on science, religion, technology, pop culture, photography and faith from the Aotearoa New Zealand
Category: Science & Technology
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This report on the announcement of an extra-solar planet (ie. one orbiting another star) that lies within the zone where water would be a fluid and is relatively small looks interesting. See SPACE.com — Major Discovery: New Planet Could Harbor Water and Life.
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This looks promising. Touch is much harder to simulate in VR than sound and vision. This development seems to bring it a bit close. See Haptic glove to touch on virtual fabrics – tech – 13 February 2007 – New Scientist.
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Various links related to convergent technologies (nano-, bio-, information technologies and cognitive science): Biosingularity – Techno-progressive blog that tracks new developments in bio- and medical technologies. (More on singularitarianism at Greenflame: Pondering the Singularity (Again)). The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines – Alternatives to the big four search engines (Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. The…
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Just erased and reinstalled everything on the iBook to get over the wobbles it was developing at the end of the thesis writing. In the process found these links I’d saved earlier. Ashley X links: WIRED Blogs: Bodyhack – Brain-Damaged Girl Will Stay Young Forever Parents defend decision to keep girl a child – World…
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New images and other media from the ongoing Cassini-Huygens probe to Saturn. I’m continually amazed at probes like this, and the ability of the technical staff to extract/construct images etc. from the raw data supplied by the probe. See: Cassini Imaging Diary NASA – Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn JPL – Cassini-Huygens Home
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Listened to James Hughes’ recent Changersurfer Radio podcast yesterday where he interviews Lee Silver (author of “Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning will Transform the American Family“, and more lately “Challenging Nature: The clash of science and spirituality at the new frontiers of life“.) It’s an interesting interview because both Hughes and Silver sketch…
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A conscience vote in the Australian House of Representatives passed legislation opening the door to human embryonic research (particularly therapeutic cloning) in Australia. See Embryo cloning gets the go-ahead – National – smh.com.au. It’ll be interesting to see how that shapes discussion in NZ over the same issue.
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Vernor Vinge’s presentation of the technological singularity back in 1993 (PDF here) talked about the scenario where human intellect is augmented through better communications networks and human-computer interfaces. Here’s a recent article in the Boston Globe that picks up on the “intelligence augmentation” (IA) within contemporary settings. See Souls of a new machine – The…
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Brief article on CNet about robots that are aware of their own bodies. See Researchers unveil a self-aware robot | CNET News.com. Related to an article published this month in Science. Abstract at: Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling — Bongard et al. 314 (5802): 1118 — Science Auxiliary files: Resilient Machines Through Continuous Self-Modeling —…
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I’ve found Cynthia Breazeal’s robotics research both interesting and theologically provocative, and I’ve referred to her book “Designing Sociable Robots (Intelligent Robotics and Autonomous Agents)” in several places in the thesis. PBS is running a profile on her on their scienceNOW web site (including video later this week). Links there to various slideshows, articles etc.…