Gordon's Notes

TL;DR: It's not that ChatGPT is miraculous, it's that cognitive science research suggests human cognition is also not miraculous. &q...

While recently rereading Banks’ marvelous book The Algebraist I decide I ought to write a post about “The Truth”, which is basically Bostro...

MINUTES OF THE GREETING COMMITTEE 45255425.34543.5 "… Resolution passed. What’s next?” “We have a confirmed candidate. Spiral arm, wa...

I haven’t read Picketty ’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century . I’ll skim it in the library some day, but I’m fine outsourcing that work to...

Any discussion of the Fermi Paradox has to be presented with a wink and a chuckle. Even if, behind the wink, there's a haunted look in ...

I haven't done a Drake/Fermi Paradox post for ages. A lot has happened in the meantime; in particular estimates of the number of potenti...

Google's brain module was trained on YouTube stills. From vast amounts of data, one image spontaneously emerged ... Using large-scale...

Under some conditions, researchers are able to translate brain electrical signals into concepts/sounds which can be expressed using English ...

I read Charlie Stross's Rule 34 . Here's my 5 star Amazon review (slightly modified as I thought of a few more things): Rule 34 is...

I used to teach Bayesian reasoning to informatics students. I couldn't justify to them why such simple math felt both spooky and profoun...

As a Catholic schoolboy in 1930s Quebec my father practiced a form of polemics known as Apologetics [1]. He argued through reason for the ...

Consider these three recent articles together ... One ... Dienekes' Anthropology Blog: Brains to Hand-axes quoting Science Daily Stone ...

Twenty light years away an  ancient largeish planet is tidally locked to a red giant . The star system is about 9 billion years old.  Time...

Once upon a time if you put two phone handsets together, speaker to microphone, you get a massive burst of positive feedback . Each handset ...

I expected this ... Robert Reich (The (Almost) Crash of Wall Street) .... Ninety minutes before the end of the trading day today, the ...

Once upon a time it was every computer virus for itself. In those days there wasn’t much competition, and there wasn’t much of a business mo...

From the Royal Society 2 day conference on SETI , commentary on the most likely response to news of LGM ... Even if we found aliens, how wou...

I share the common geek interest in the failure of SETI and it's possible relationship to the Fermi Paradox . So I was pleased to read ...

Another week, another world . This one is wet (emphases mine) ... .... The alien world known as GJ 1214b orbits a red dwarf star one-fifth t...

I'm a geek. So I love to puzzle with the Fermi Paradox , and, like many fellow geeks , I'm tempted to connect the Great Silence to t...