Adriano

kudos to Pablo Baqués. - Adriano

"I’m Anna. I studied Sociology & Anthropology in school. I did a stint in the Peace Corps, and now I spend too much time online. Bienvenidos a mi blog. Sometimes I post my thoughts in words, but mostly I post pics from flickr--graff, street art, architecture, cupcakes, decay, New York City, abandoned buildings, beautiful landscape, cute animals, and anything else that catches my eye." \\ At FF https://friendfeed.com/annahar... - Adriano

"Counteracting unwanted intimacies... in such a small, enclosed space it becomes vital to act in a way that cannot be construed as threatening, odd or in any way ambiguous. The easiest way to do this is to avoid eye-contact. "We don't like to be locked into a place. We want to get out of the elevator as soon as possible, because, you know, it's a creepy place to be." During his trapped ordeal, Nick White began to think of another enclosed space that lurks at the back of our minds -- a tomb." - Adriano

"Source: United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, Author: Federal Bureau of Investigation. Presented in 09-CR-01184 (RJH) US District Court SDNY." - Adriano

+1 "So what's your hobby? Resurrection." \\ Curious to see how Mendes has evolved since directing "American Beauty" in 1999. It would be good to see Javier Bardem, an extraordinary actor... IMDb info http://www.imdb.com/title... ... listen to the theme song by Adele at http://ff.im/15XaMU - Adriano

+2 Roger Deakins, the nine-time-Oscar-nominated cinematographer... the Coen brothers’ cinematographer for 20 years. - Adriano

"Many mathematicians to this day don't realize that information is physical and that there is no such thing as an abstract computer. Only a physical object can compute things. Information has to be a physical quantity, and yet, information is independent of the physical object that it resides in. [C]onstructor theory consists of a language in which to express scientific theories. But these laws are not about physical objects. They're laws about other laws obeying constructor theoretic principles." \\ Really interesting remarks about von Neumann and cellular automata theory. - Adriano

the papers in preparation with Chiara Marletto are listed here: http://goo.gl/ipoCi esp. "An algebraic approach to constructor theory" and "Constructor-theoretic foundations of quantum and classical information." \\ Paper on the "Quantum Logic of Self-replication" is still being refined, currently at the dissertation stage. - Adriano

thinking of this as an axiomatic system covering all possible physical laws, using information units as initial elements, the mathematical structure similar to C*-Algebras and von Neumann Algebras (operator algebra) -- bounded by an explicit set of physical constraints (the impossibilities). But will the rules of logical inference be non-classical? - Adriano

Constructor Theory by David Deutsch | Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford (2012) (pdf) http://arxiv.org/ftp... - Amira

just got a suggestion to join Pheed which opened up couple months ago. It appears to be like MySpace v2.0 in its appeal to the music community, but there are Friendfeed similarities: "We offer the standard sharing features such as text, photos and videos, but decided to spice it up a little by adding new stuff like voice-notes, audio clips and live-broadcasting." I joined: https://www.pheed.com/rsvp since Machine Gun Kelly showed up :-) \\ Mashable article on Pheed: http://mashable.com/2012... - Adriano

Hilarious because the equations are soooo bogus... see PDF http://goo.gl/t7pqB "We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript: ID : 5300285 \ TITLE : Independent, negative, canonically Turing arrows of equations and problems in applied formal PDE \ AUTHORS :Marcie Rathke \ has been accepted. Congratulations!" - Adriano

"When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: “I get stupider and stupider every day.” Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question. Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating." - Adriano

24 meets Dostoyevsky! amazing dialogue... "10-part web series created by Kiefer Sutherland, written and directed by Brad Mirman. Each episode (or "chapter") is between five and seven minutes long." \\ In its entirety at Netflix: http://movies.netflix.com/WiMovie... Angst-ridden hit man confesses his sins to an astonished priest... no spoiler, just watch it unfold. - Adriano

See inside one of Google's data centers in this guided streetview tour: http://www.google.com/about... \\ Levy's full article is at Wired: http://www.wired.com/wireden... - Adriano

Superb extended sets... all downloadable. \\ "Bringing sound, music and mobility to Burning Man, NYC, SF and Hong Kong." - Adriano

front and rear view of the "Øresund bridge that connects Copenhagen, Denmark and Malmo, Sweden." \\ Invert the expression "water under the bridge" :-) what's it like driving there? - Adriano

It's OK, but people will say you're in the "bridge and tunnel crowd" - Larry Hosken

in theatres 10 Jan 2013 -- Malick has not released a trailer for this film, only a still. \\ "After visiting Mont Saint-Michel, Marina and Neil come to Oklahoma, where problems arise. Marina meets a priest and fellow exile, who is struggling with his vocation, while Neil renews his ties with a childhood friend, Jane." http://www.imdb.com/title... - Adriano

"Plot details are being kept under wraps, although the title refers to a tarot card that, when placed upright, represents [per Wikipedia], “change and new excitements, particularly of a romantic nature. It can mean invitations, opportunities, and offers.” But if the card is reversed, it means “unreliability and recklessness. It indicates fraud, false promises and trickery. It represents a person who has trouble discerning when and where the truth ends and lies begin.” Sounds like a good premise for a character drama." \\ Storyline: A man, temptations, celebrity, and excess. http://www.imdb.com/title... - Adriano

Natalie Portman while filming Terrence Malick's "Knight Of Cups" http://imgur.com/r... - Adriano

"Palaeogeneticists led by Morten Allentoft and Michael Bunce examined 158 DNA-containing leg bones belonging to three species of extinct giant birds called moa. The bones, which were between 600 and 8,000 years old, had been recovered from three sites within 5 kilometres of each other, with nearly identical preservation conditions. By comparing the specimens' ages and degrees of DNA degradation, the researchers calculated that DNA has a half-life of 521 years. That means that after 521 years, half of the bonds between nucleotides in the backbone of a sample would have broken; after another 521 years half of the remaining bonds would have gone; and so on. Even in a bone at an ideal preservation temperature of −5 ºC, effectively every bond would be destroyed after a maximum of 6.8 million years. The DNA would cease to be readable much earlier — perhaps after roughly 1.5 million years, when the remaining strands would be too short to give meaningful information." http://rspb.royalsocietypublis... - Adriano

#bookmark - Heart Attack

"George Poinar, Jr., a zoology professor at Oregon State University, explains: "This was a male wasp that suddenly found itself trapped in a spider web. This was the wasp's worst nightmare, and it never ended. The wasp was watching the spider just as it was about to be attacked, when tree resin flowed over and captured both of them." The amber that holds the two bugs also contains 15 strands of spider silk and was excavated in a Burmese mine. Researchers say the amber dates back to the Early Cretaceous period, some 97 million to 110 million years ago. It's the first fossil evidence of a spider attack." \\ Both wasp (Cascoscelio incassus) and spider (Geratonephila burmanica) species are extinct today. - Adriano

"Kahneman sent an email to a group of a dozen or so psychologists telling them that the credibility of their field was in danger. The recipients all worked on social priming – the study of how subtle unconscious cues can influence our behaviour. It’s an area that has attracted controversy of late, due to failed replications of classic results, the outing of fraudulent researchers, and a more general concern among psychologists about the validity of their field’s results. Kahneman meant the email as helpful advice, but his wording couldn’t have been stronger: “Your field is now the poster child for doubts about the integrity of psychological research… I believe that you should collectively do something about this mess.” His solution: a “daisy chain” of replications, where laboratories collaborate to check the results of their neighbours, in an open, transparent, and pre-established way." Letter, http://goo.gl/XE6kK - Adriano

"The researchers' experiments showed how specialized, mature cells could be returned to a embryonic-like state, and then be coaxed into becoming all other cells of the body. The ability to pull off this trick—the biological equivalent of turning back time—ranks as one of the more head-spinning feats of modern science. It has triggered the rewriting of biology textbooks and given birth to new areas of research. Without this discovery, known as cellular reprogramming, Dolly the sheep and all later cloning experiments would not have been possible. It also allows scientists to create human embryonic stem cells without having to destroy human embryos, sidestepping an approach that has long been fraught with ethical controversies. Most important, perhaps, it has significantly advanced the prospect of using a patient's own mature cells to create fresh tissue and treat disease." - Adriano

must see excerpt from Gurdon's high school report card: http://ff.im/15VuMJ - Adriano

"The film by Martin McDonagh concerns the misadventures of Marty (Colin Farrel), a screenwriter with serious writer’s block, whose weirdo dog-snatching friends (Sam Rockwell and Christopher Walken) get them all in big trouble when they steal the beloved pet Shih Tzu of an insane gangster (Woody Harrelson)." \\ See also http://www.imdb.com/title... - Adriano

2001 film by David Lynch: Mulholland Dr. -- ranked 28 of 250 top films since 1902 by the British Film Institute poll of 846 critics, academics, and distributors this year, http://goo.gl/mGwCh - Adriano

"Tononi's theory goes roughly like this: consciousness is not an all-or-nothing property but instead exists on a gradient and can be quantified. Consciousness arises from complex systems that can take on many configurations where the information generated by the whole above and beyond its parts. Drawing on information theory, Tononi has devised a set of equations that capture an organism's levels of differentiation (the ability to distinguish many states) and integration (communication across the system). His final measure for the degree of consciousness -- a single number -- is denoted by the Greek letter phi. But I haven't yet told you the most remarkable part about this book: It's not a science text, it's a narrative fiction in the style of Dante's "Divine Comedy" in which the protagonist is nudged toward insight by a helpful interlocutor." - Adriano

seemingly difficult question: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a physical system to generate experience? see Tononi (2008), Integrated Information in Discrete Dynamical Systems: Motivation and Theoretical Framework, PLoS Computational Biology 4(6):e1000091, http://goo.gl/vO3Rl PDF for details on phi. \\ Christof KOCH (2009 SciAm) offers an informal exposition http://goo.gl/xiuUz of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness. - Adriano

Tononi also has a manifesto published as "Consciousness as Integrated Information" (2008) in Biological Bulletin 215(3):216-242, http://goo.gl/CQz8V PDF. "We need to perform a prohibitively large set of computations. One would need to perturb a system in all possible ways and use Bayes’ rule to keep track of the probabilities of the previous states given the current output, and then calculate the relative entropy between the potential and the actual distributions. Moreover, this must be done for all possible subsets of a system (to find complexes) and for all combinations of connections (to obtain the shape of each quale). Finally, the calculations must be repeated at multiple spatial and temporal scales to determine what is the optimal grain size, in space and time, for generating integrated information. It goes without saying that these calculations are presently unfeasible for anything but the smallest systems." - Adriano

"A highly conscious experience is a discrimination among trillions of alternatives—it specifies that what is the case is this particular state of affairs, which differs from a trillion other states of affairs in its own peculiar way, and in a way that is imbued with evolutionary value. Equivalently, one can say that a quale of high Φ represents a discrimination that is extremely context-sensitive, and thus likely to be useful. Experience is choice, and a highly conscious choice is a choice that is both highly informed and highly integrated." --ibid. in closing. - Adriano

"Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality. [P]eople today are avidly immersed in a hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design." - Adriano

chandelier \ ironing espresso maker \ click link for more human ingenuity :-) - Adriano

"The "Ecce Homo" a depiction of Christ crowned with thorns painted by local artist Elias Garcia Martinez has graced the wall of the Santuario de Misericodia Church in the village of Borja, near Zaragoza, Spain, for more than 120 years. But over the last 18 months its surface has deteriorated due to moisture in the church, causing parts of the painting to flake off. A woman in her 80s, upset at the worsening state of an image she loved to gaze on, took it upon herself to restore the artwork to its former glory, but with devastating results. The result was a botched repair in which the original face has been almost completely painted over with amateur brushstrokes and the image now resembles more ape than man." - Adriano

That lady later demanded payment from the Church for her work -- legal heads-up for those using her derivative image as avatar on social networks :-) - Adriano

"Here are some far out places of faith which house followers of many different creeds. Whether it is Orthodox Christianity, Buddhism or Islam, these monasteries were built to be protected from the powers that be – ones that may not agree with their words and lifestyle. They were built on mountains, rocks or cliff sides, overlooking beautiful vistas where one could chant into infinity and be “away from the world.”" - Adriano

"In 2005 Everett shot to international prominence with a paper http://goo.gl/KsoV3 claiming that he had identified features of the Pirahã language that challenged Noam Chomsky’s influential theory that human language is governed by "universal grammar," a genetically determined capacity that imposes the same fundamental shape on all the world’s tongues. That paper, published in the journal Current Anthropology, turned him into something of a popular hero, embraced in the press as a giant killer who had felled the mighty Chomsky -- but denounced by some fellow linguists as a fraud promoting dubious ideas about a powerless indigenous group while refusing to release his data to skeptics." Book reviewed http://www.nytimes.com/2012... - Adriano

"A French citizen has unintentionally breached the security of the French central bank over the phone and was freed by French authorities after being accused of "hacking" the central bank’s and triggering a 48-hours shut down of that particular computer system which handles the consumer indebtedness files. The man was trying to go around the paid telephone consumer support system and got from Internet forums what he thought was a direct-line to the central bank employees. When asked for a code by an automated system, he entered 123456 and it worked – he had just breached the central bank’s security. It gets better: according to the man’s attorney, 654321 would have worked as well." - Adriano

"Your average episode of “Breaking Bad” or “The Good Wife” or “Louie” will generate many times more debate and conversation – more actual excitement — than all except perhaps a half-dozen movies released this year (and most of those will involve superheroes). Film culture, at least in the sense people once used that phrase, is dead or dying. Back in what we might call the Susan Sontag era, discussion and debate about movies was often perceived as the icy-cool cutting edge of American intellectual life. Today it’s a moribund and desiccated leftover that’s been cut off from ordinary life, from the mainstream of pop culture and even from what remains of highbrow or intellectual culture." - Adriano

cf. chart at http://ff.im/12J7xe CINEMA getting worse since 1950s :: plotting the British Film Institute 1902-2012 rankings. - Adriano

includes socks in laundry... "Once objects fall through the event horizon, they're lost forever. Although the event horizon is an imaginary line that's impossible to observe, astronomers have imaged the region around a giant black hole at the center of a distant galaxy, and measured, for the first time, the closest stable orbit in which matter can circle the black hole. The supermassive black hole in question lies at the center of the galaxy M87, which is about 50 million light-years from our own Milky Way. This behemoth black hole contains the mass of 6 billion suns. Using a new observatory called the EVENT HORIZON TELESCOPE, which links up radio dishes in Hawaii, Arizona and California, astronomers measured that the innermost possible orbit for matter around the black hole is roughly 5.5 times the size of the black hole's event horizon. This innermost orbit is about five times the size of the solar system, or 750 times the distance from Earth to the sun." - Adriano

Sheperd Doeleman and his colleagues have published the results of their study this week in the journal Science: "The derived size of 5.5 ± 0.4 Schwarzschild radii is significantly smaller than the innermost edge of a retrograde accretion disk, suggesting that the M87 jet is powered by an accretion disk in a prograde orbit around a spinning black hole." http://www.sciencemag.org/content... - Adriano

"Built beginning around 520 B.C., the city was a showcase for the empire's staggering wealth, with grand architecture, extravagant works of silver and gold, and extensive relief sculptures such as this one portraying envoys with offerings for the king. The height of Persian rule lasted from about 550 B.C. until 330 B.C., when Alexander the Great overthrew the ruling Archaemenid dynasty and burned Persepolis to the ground." - Adriano

via @atalanta1 \\ I had to look up the direct link http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf... since the photo was so strong and vivid -- as a reminder of how grand dynasties just come and go... - Adriano

"A system does tend toward disorder, which is the lowest "energy state" of the system, so how could evolution go in the other direction? It's because the Sun is always injecting new energy into the system, and it does it in a way that is harnessed by biochemistry and the ecosystem. The Earth is an open system, not a closed one. New energy in the form of sunlight is the first step of an "energy gradient" that flows through the ecosystem of life at multiple levels. This energy gradient drives the biochemistry of evolution: sunlight -> photosynthesis -> ATP production -> complex molecule construction -> food -> growth and reproduction (+ mutation) -> evolution. If the Sun were to "turn off" tomorrow, then evolution would come to a stop and life on earth would freeze over and decay into a lifeless rock." --Paul King - Adriano