James D. Watson: The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
Gary Marcus: Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind
Bhante H. Gunaratana: Mindfulness in Plain English, Updated and Expanded Edition
Andrew Robinson: The Man Who Deciphered Linear B: The Story of Michael Ventris
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The Singularity Summit will be held at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco on the weekend of Sept 8-9, and focuses on a fascinating question: what will happen when humans create a powerful artificial intelligence?
My science-fiction movie "Destiny" is based on what I think will happen, and it will be interesting to see what other conference attendees predict.
Here's Destiny, the future of humanity:
This interesting article provides a critique of the recent publicized study that suggests occasional marijuana use can significantly increase the risk of schizophrenia. It provides insight into conventional wisdom, bias and failure to properly place science in context.
Update: Here's an interesting related article.
I enjoy tracking technology trends, and back in the 1980s I spent a while learning about genetic algorithms. The basic idea is that rather than trying to solve a problem in an intelligent top-down way, you create a pool of alternative solutions that replicate, mutate, and compete to solve the problem in a bottom-up fashion.
I thought the idea had a lot of merit and figured out a way to introduce genetic algorithms into my computer science course at the University of Texas at Dallas. So I was interested to see that genetic algorithms (also known as evolutionary algorithms) are now surpassing humans in several areas of design.
Vive les machines!
I just got back from the Ice Bar in Stockholm, Sweden, after enjoying a "Nordic Blue" liquor. This was the fourth ice bar I've visited; the other three were in Helsinki, St. Petersburg and Quebec City.
I thought that perhaps I had visited all the ice bars in the world, but tonight found out that there are several others in major cities such as London, Tokyo, Milan, and Sydney.
A few months ago I posted about my tennis lessons with McClain tennis. I'm happy to report that they continue to go well, and that my forehand has gone from being weak to pretty decent. In order to keep the momentum up, I've increased to 3 lessons a week with the goal of entering some tournaments in the Fall. If you want to learn tennis in San Francisco, I highly recommend McClain.
For those who are interested in where edu 2.0 is heading, here are some of the features we're going to be releasing over the next 3 months:
In addition, we're working on a virtual playground that will allow students to learn any kind of knowledge in a fun and immersive environment.
If you're interested in the future of education, I encourage you to join the edu 2.0 community - it's free!
I just arrived in Sweden and spent the morning on various edu 2.0 matters and planning the rest of my trip.
Stockholm has lots of fun things to do; here's my (optimistic) to-do list for the next 3 days:
If anyone's been to Stockholm and sees any obvious omissions, please let me know!
After switching to postfix, we found that emails sent to Yahoo and HotMail accounts were being treated as spam - sigh. To improve the situation, we changed the hostname to host.edu20.org and the rDNS setting to host.edu20.org as well. After making this change, Yahoo now accepts emails fine but HotMail blocks them completely. So the next step is to figure out how to get around the HotMail protection.
Ahh, the joys of a startup.....
Fellow travelers will enjoy this quote of the day:
"An open mind is your best traveling companion"
The quote was written on the outside of my SAS plane to Sweden, right next to the cabin door for boarding passengers to see.
We just encountered an interesting problem with the edu 2.0 email system that I thought I'd share.
When we first launched the site, we decided to use the Gmail SMTP server for sending emails. Everything worked fine until we hit the 500 user mark, at which point we noticed that some emails were not being sent successfully. The reason: Gmail imposes a 500-emails per day limit to prevent spamming.
We decided that the best alternative strategy was to use the sendmail program which comes pre-installed on LINUX servers. We switched over to sendmail (a single line modification in Rails) and everything seemed to be fine. We tested the system by sending a few emails to our test accounts; no problems.
A day later, I noticed that the number of people joining our site seemed to decrease, but I attributed this to a natural fluctuation in early users. However, after a while I noticed that some people just weren't getting emails that the system sent to them. After some debugging, we finally got a big clue; all the people who had recently joined our site had a Gmail account!
It turns out that we didn't have the more modern "postfix" sendmail utility and the one that was installed didn't process DNS correctly. The result was that Gmail accepted our emails and other systems rejected them. Sure enough, I found that around 100 people who had recently tried to join had never received their activation codes. Oops!
The good news is that we found the bug and switched over to the new system. We'll do some more testing with accounts that aren't on Gmail (Yahoo, AOL, HotMail at the minimum) and send apology emails to the people who recently tried to join. The other bit of good news is that our user base has actually been expanding, although it wasn't showing up due to the email issue.
It's good to get these kinds of issues straighted out early. I wonder how many more of them are lurking?
Destiny is my science fiction movie about the future of humanity. It's an epic, similar in breadth and scope to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
To see the 18 minute video, click on the graphic below.
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