Lifeboat Foundation

A documentary film just had its premiere at the Hot Docs festival in Toronto. How To Build A Time Machine, the work of filmmaker Jay Cheel, is a strange and incoherent little document of two middle-aged men with loosely related obsessions: One of them wants to build a perfect recreation of a movie prop – the machine from the 1960 movie The Time Machine, based on the H.G. Wells novel – and the other is a theoretical physicist who thinks he may have effected a kind of time travel in a lab, on a microscopic scale, using lasers that push particles around. The weak connection between the two men is that they both regret a death in their past – a best friend, a father – and are preoccupied with what they might have done to prevent the death; they both wonder if time travel to the past might have been a remedy for death itself. (Compared to the protagonist of Zero K who seeks immortality as a way of avoiding the loss of a loved one.) The 80s synthpop song Forever Young by Alphaville booms symbolically at one point.

Why this sudden ascendancy of yearning for immortality now? Is it simply because immortality of a medical sort might be imminent, a result of technological advances, such as nanobots, that will fight disease in our bloodstream? Or is it because, as Ray Kurzweil implies, digital technology is now so advanced that we have already left our bodies behind? We already live outside them, and our digital selves will outlive them. (“I mean,” says Kurzweil, “this little Android phone I’m carrying on my belt is not yet inside my physical body, but that’s an arbitrary distinction.”)

The frequently quoted axiom of Arthur C. Clarke – “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic” – is pertinent to this current fascination with life without end. We are now perceiving technology as not just magic but as god-like, as life-giving, as representing an entirely new plane of being.

Continue reading “Russell Smith: What’s behind our sudden fascination with immortality?” »

New reports that Russia is considering lava tubes as habitat; here’s one from my lava tube archives…

Nearside of Moon, by Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

With only a trace of an exosphere, future lunar astronauts working nights outside will likely feel as if they are walking a catwalk through space itself.

Continue reading “Life In A Lunar Lava Tube: Nearside Tunnels As Ready-Made Moonbases” »

Again, we all must ask ourselves “What is it that we all need and want v. being told what we need and want by a 20 something old who gets take out or heats up a tv dinner, etc. And, truly what makes sense from an investment, ROI, and security risk adverse investment approach.” 1st, I like making and having my own choices in how I run my house, and operating style at work and private life. 2nd, I don’t trust our out dated digital infrastructure to warrant a great investment in all things AI.

Until I see AI that assist me instead of trying to work against me or replace me as well as having security; then not bought in 100%.

The U.S. manufacturing sector has changed rapidly in the last decade and continues to change as new techonolgy innovations emerge. Daniel Araya and Christopher Sulavik discuss how schools can react to educate a skilled labor force for this new era of robot technolgies.

Continue reading “Disrupting manufacturing: Innovation and the future of skilled labor” »

Researchers at the University of Liverpool have developed a set of algorithms that will help teach computers to process and understand human languages.

Whilst mastering natural language is easy for humans, it is something that computers have not yet been able to achieve. Humans understand language through a variety of ways for example this might be through looking up it in a dictionary, or by associating it with words in the same sentence in a meaningful way.

The algorithms will enable a computer to act in much the same way as a human would when encountered with an unknown word. When the computer encounters a word it doesn’t recognise or understand, the algorithms mean it will look up the word in a dictionary (such as the WordNet), and tries to guess what other words should appear with this unknown word in the text.

Nice

J.E. Moss Elementary School, a Title I school in Nashville, TN, has adopted an augmented reality program to help improve reading skills in one of its kindergarten classes.

Letters alive, a supplemental reading software kit from Alive Studios, has aided teacher Greg Smedley-Warren and boosted his kindergarten class’ literacy scores above all the other kindergarten classrooms in his school, according to a prepared statement. His class includes several ELL and “at risk” students.

Continue reading “Nashville School Uses Augmented Reality” »

Interesting…

We are presenting a series of quantum mechanics models that were produced during a five year Public Education Project hosted on Facebook known as String Theory Development group. The topics researched included M-Theory (string theory) and Applied.

This article originally appeared on Spectrum on May 2, 2016.

Lookout Silicon Valley — FDA is here. I do suggest tech companies working on technologies that enhances or alters any bio living things to ensure that your certifications, processes are well defined and govern, and in some cases the engineers, etc. will need some level of a medical background and certifications as well. Why many have stated that future engineers and technologists will need a bio background through education, etc.

Helmy Eltoukhy’s company is on a roll. The start-up is a leading contender in the crowded field of firms working on “liquid biopsy” tests that aim to be able to tell in a single blood draw whether a person has cancer.

Venture investors are backing Guardant Health to the tune of nearly $200 million. Leading medical centers are testing its technology. And earlier this month, it presented promising data on how well its screening tool, which works by scanning for tiny DNA fragments shed by dying tumor cells, worked on an initial group of 10,000 patients with late-stage cancers.

Continue reading “There’s a new sheriff in town in Silicon Valley — the FDA” »

A virtual classroom on the dark web aims to boost the cyberskills of those who want to join the collective known as Anonymous.