Claire Berlinsky interviews Ilhan Tanir

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Claire Berlinsky interviews Ilhan Tanir, the Turkish journalist who managed to get into Syria during the recent troubles by claiming to be a…shwarma chef?

Of the interview, she says (on Facebook):

After a day of trying to upload the rest of the videos and thinking about what I can do to present what limited information I have in some journalistically responsible way, I’ve reached my limit. Let me put this to you simply. Assad is a monster. He is evil beyond comprehension. No one is going to stop him until he and everyone around him is dead. But you’re out of your minds if you convince yourself the FSA is comprised of potentially friendly, liberal democrats. There’s not a liberal democrat between here and the Horn of Africa, just trust me on this.

Cycles and vortices

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Could universes be circular and concurrent? Stephen Hawking says: “We Should Look for Evidence of a Collision with Another Universe in Our Distant Past”

“Our best bet for a theory of everything is M-theory –an extension of string theory,” Hawking continued. “One prediction of M-theory is that there are many different universes, with different values for the physical constants. This might explain why the physical constants we measure seem fine-tuned to the values required for life to exist.”

It is no surprise that we observe the physical constants to be finely-tuned. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe them. One way of testing the theory that we may be one of many universes would be to look for features in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) which would indicate the collision of another universe with ours in the distant past.

The circular patterns within the cosmic microwave background suggest that space and time did not come into being at the Big Bang but that our universe in fact continually cycles through a series of “aeons,” according to University of Oxford theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, who says that data collected by NASA’s WMAP satellite supports his idea of “conformal cyclic cosmology”.

Although we try to make our universe straightforward and linear, the circular nature of things is all around us *

Link thanks to Whales

The Hive Mind

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What could an internet based collective intelligence accomplish?

Via The Inquirer:

…crowdsourcing can be extremely effective, as MIT’s Riley Crane showed in answering DARPA’s challenge to find 10 weather balloons moored around the US. The MIT team used social networks and a pyramid of financial incentives to recruit volunteers, their friends and their friends of friends to report sightings – and won by finding all 10 within nine hours.

“Not all hard problems can be solved by aggregation,” he said. Unlike movie recommendations or Google Instant, problems like the balloon challenge require “coordination or collaboration”. The reports of sightings weren’t enough by themselves. The team had to eliminate false reports by comparing reported locations with IP addresses.

“This is a toy problem,” he said, “but it’s still starting to show some of the possibilities of what we’re going to be able to do in future.”

Other interesting approaches included the MIT Media Lab’s Alexander Wissner-Gross, who argues that if a planet-scale superhuman intelligence emerges it will most likely be from either the quantitative finance or advertising industries. Both have great incentives and great rewards for improvement. These proposals seem dubious on one count: given recent market history it’s arguable that a quantitative finance-derived AI would crash every six months.