If you don’t know what this is for, then I suppose this is your first time on the internet (welcome!) and you don’t have anything to be angry (or worried) about.
It’s just so f***ing disappointing when the conspiracy-nuts are proven right.
Here’s the link to the german guy who designed this poster:
Dennett’s done it again! His newest book is called “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking”, and that’s what the book delivers. This is yet another masterpiece by Dennett and, like most of his work, it is a very accessible book.
Here’s the blurb:
Over a storied career, Daniel C. Dennett has engaged questions about science and the workings of the mind. His answers have combined rigorous argument with strong empirical grounding. And a lot of fun. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking offers seventy-seven of Dennett’s most successful “imagination-extenders and focus-holders” meant to guide you through some of life’s most treacherous subject matter: evolution, meaning, mind, and free will. With patience and wit, Dennett deftly deploys his thinking tools to gain traction on these thorny issues while offering readers insight into how and why each tool was built. Alongside well-known favorites like Occam’s Razor and reductio ad absurdum lie thrilling descriptions of Dennett’s own creations: Trapped in the Robot Control Room, Beware of the Prime Mammal, and The Wandering Two-Bitser. Ranging across disciplines as diverse as psychology, biology, computer science, and physics, Dennett’s tools embrace in equal measure light-heartedness and accessibility as they welcome uninitiated and seasoned readers alike. As always, his goal remains to teach you how to “think reliably and even gracefully about really hard questions.” A sweeping work of intellectual seriousness that’s also studded with impish delights, Intuition Pumps offers intrepid thinkers–in all walks of life–delicious opportunities to explore their pet ideas with new powers.
If you enjoy thinking, and you’d like to learn by a professional, then buy this book!
You can hear the professor talk about it at a recent “AtGoogleTalks” lecture:
Today, on the anniversary of Alan Turing‘s death (7 June 1954), I thought I should mention a couple of books about his life and work that I think are worth reading.
How did computers take over the world? From the lowliest iPhone app to Google’s sprawling metazoan codes, we live in a world of self-replicating numbers and self-reproducing machines. This title re-creates the experimentation, mathematical insight and creative genius that led to the dawn of the digital universe.
This book by George Dyson was published in 2012, but I wasn’t aware of it until I watched his latest lecture at the Long Now foundation. (Click here for the seminar primer.)
If you’re fast, you can still view the lecture at fora.tv. I don’t know how long they leave it up, but it’s certainly not forever as this content is normally only available to “Long Now” members (which, I am proud to say, I am.) If that link doesn’t work, you can download the audio of the lecture from the foundation’s podcast, which is also available on iTunes.
I just noticed: by coincidence, this book arrived today.
Gives coverage of the many ways in which Alan Turing’s scientific endeavors have impacted research and understanding of the world. Suitable for researchers, this title also offers an approachable entry point for readers with limited training in the science, but an urge to learn more about the details of Turing’s work.
This is a big, dense book! The index, alone, is 35 pages. It’s also relatively expensive, which I put down to (a) it being an Elsevier book and (b) a collection of essays which, I suppose, is its own copyright hell. This book’s been on my wishlist long before it was available for pre-order, so I’m really happy to have it on my desk.
Professor Daniel C. Dennett (my favorite philosopher) is one of the contributors – which is how I actually found out about this book: I keep an eye on the professor’s bibliography so I don’t miss anything.
In my free time, I’m designing and building a robot. It’s a great hobby! I don’t want to give away the design just yet – but it’s going to have wheels, and I’ve decided to use skateboard wheels.
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This is Commander Chris Hadfield’s music video of his version of “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. And I say, with absolutely no irony, this is money well spent!
Remember these Wired covers?
Well, I do! That’s scientist, professor, visionary, and philanthropist, Nicholas Negroponte by the way. If you don’t know who Negroponte is, you really should. He’s changed your world many times – for the better!, and he’s bent on doing it again and again and again.
Anyway. Remember the covers? I really liked them. They’d take a picture, make it all pixeley and blockey, and then they’d put little pictures in the blocks. It’s a nice trick, and one I dediced to reproduce – I wanted to make a poster that was a picture of my daughter that consisted of… lots of little pictures of my daughter. You get the idea. So, I went on and wrote an application: PhotoMosaic.
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Today, I received my copy of “The Shining Girls” by Lauren Beukes. It’s a signed, limited edition, and my copy is 363 of 1000.
I had to order this little beauty by e-mail – something I never would have done were it not for the author personally recommending the bookstore.
The shining girls black editions look amazing! Check out the gorgeous photo end papers. Only 954 left to sign! http://t.co/bBAQXe5DMa—
Lauren Beukes (@laurenbeukes) April 06, 2013
@laurenbeukes Where can I get a signed black edition?—
M Sarigiannidis (@m1chal1s) April 07, 2013
.@m1chal1s I think booklounge@gmail.com in CT may still have a handful of black edition The Shining Girls (SA). Ask them about postage costs—
Lauren Beukes (@laurenbeukes) April 07, 2013
@laurenbeukes great! will do.—
M Sarigiannidis (@m1chal1s) April 07, 2013
So that’s what I did! The good people at the Book Lounge were very friendly and helpful, and my book flew all the way from South Africa to the Netherlands in no time.
I’ve been waiting a very, very, very long time for VR to come true. So far, it’s been the domain of academia, and novelty gadgets. No VR hardware has ever made it to the mainstream.
OculusVR seems to be the first to have the potential to break through – and it started on Kickstarter.
There’s quite a lot of hype around Oculus now, so there’s quite a lot of well-designed word-of-mouth propaganda out there. If you visit the site, you’ll even find a couple of those faux-Jonathan-Ive videos of a person talking very sincerely about their visionary design. By all means, have a look. If you just want to see the one video that says it all, though, have a look at this:
Recently, I and a colleague were asked to prepare a presentation for a sales pitch. The goal was to convince a client we knew nothing about that ours was the best approach to face his company’s challenge. We didn’t know the company, and we were expected to sell a service we knew nothing about. We were given 3×15 minutes with the client, and about 10 minutes to prepare the presentation. Yes, this was an exercise.
I found out that some arduino shields tend to interfere with each other. Specifically, the official arduino motor shield and the official arduino wifi shield don’t play well together. Now, I only have these two shields so I really have no idea if any of the others have such problems. I’ll let you know if I find out.
Anyway, what do I do? I want to build something that uses wifi and can also drive a stepper motor but, apparently, I can’t just stack up the shields and expect everything to work.
First of all, I thought, stacking up the shields connects all the pins. But is this necessary? I thought not. So I connected all the pins of the motor shield to the uno with jumper cables, and I started removing the cables that weren’t necessary. If everything still works after I’ve removed a cable then it wasn’t doing much, was it? This is just me being lazy again. I could do the research, or I could try to think a smarter way to find out the minimum number of pins needed. Well, my brute force attack worked.
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I recently bought a stepper motor – specifically, the mercury stepper motor (SM-42BYG011-25) you see in the picture. This is a common enough stepper motor. You’ll find it at most online stores that sell arduino stuff.
In this post, I’ll show how I managed to drive this stepper motor using the arduino motor shield (R3).
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