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News Briefs 02-04-2015

That a Mexican plays the part of Jesus so that he can be crucified seems like overkill by now…

Thanks to the J-Man for granting us a 4-day long weekend. Hang in there, bro!

Quote of the Day:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary investigations.”

~Tim Binnall, host of Binnall of America

  1. Laser projection in theaters
    It is amazing to actually triple the contrast ratio in theater projection systems. I hope that the major chains can incorporate the technology.

    The broad “picture” of trends in movie technology is that there has been an inexorable aesthetic and optical degradation – the actual quality of the images audiences are able to see in theaters has been steadily declining. This is due to the replacement of analog film in cameras and theater projectors with digital video technology. The almost infinite range of chemical reactions in film emulsion is replaced by discrete digitally controlled pixels. Besides being cheaper in many ways digital actually produces the sort of downbeat, emotionally dark effect that directors, screenwriters and producers seem to want nowadays.

    To generalize, digital is cold, hollow, ‘too clean’ and overprocessed (despite the pixels being slightly smoothed over) for an overall murky, smeary effect with little contrast and brightness. Whereas in comparison analog film is full, flowing, vivid, bright and contrasty. Color wise, digital is far inferior, usually (compared to film) having a brownish, orange/greenish murky tint.

    Unfortunately, I think this overall effect is, besides being an artifact of the digital video technology, an actual artistic choice of the ‘film’makers.

  2. Pesticides
    There are other things that can take a man’s potency too, like all the birth control chemicals in the water supply that can’t get filtered out after processing. Some believe men are doomed to disappear from the Earth.

  3. India
    Looks like the girl had a twin and what we are seeing is actually 2 heads that started to split too late and kind of got mashed together in a messed up way. Poor girl, looks like she is having trouble breathing. I know it’s culture and stuff but so many of these deformities happen in areas defined as “third world.”

  4. RE: A robot prepared for self-awareness
    > “A year ago, researchers at Bielefeld University showed that their software endowed the walking robot Hector with a simple form of consciousness. Their new research goes one step forward: they have now developed a software architecture that could enable Hector to see himself as others see him. “With this, he would have reflexive consciousness,” explains Dr. Holk Cruse, professor at the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at Bielefeld University.”

    Almost there, guys, thumbs up!

    😛

    1. A Turing Test For Robotic Pyschopathy
      http://www.sott.net/article/169096-On-the-Nature-of-Psychopathy-A-Thought-Experiment

      “A thought experiment will make this clearer. Imagine that scientists create a robotic human with artificial intelligence, which will then be tested using a variation on the Turing test, which we will call the “human” test. Questions are asked to the robot which test for a checklist of “human” traits. A normal human, responding to the test, will receive a score of 30 to 40, just as psychopaths score 30 to 40 on the PCL-R, while primitive forms of AI will receive a low score. Severely mentally ill people will similarly score in the low- to mid-range.

      Let us say that our new robot scores 26. It would be fallacious to say that, because the test is continuous, that this implies that the robot is “more or less” human. All it shows is that it shares traits with a human, and in the robot’s case, these traits may be mere programs – they are algorithms, not real experiences with syntactical content. They only give the appearance of humanity.”

    2. “A robot prepared for self-awareness”
      Behind this project is the old idea that if you are not able to understand the nature of consciousness (so as to actually design a conscious AI system), then you might be able to develop a robotic system that mimics the evolution of primitive animal nervous systems and bodies (beginning with insects in this case) in such a way that properties of consciousness hopefully start to appear by themselves through some magical process called “emergence”.

      This is the fallacy of “emergentism”. It’s a fallacy because mind, consciousness and self-awareness belong to a fundamentally different level of existence than physical “things” and their interactions. Only physical things and their interactions can emerge from the interactions of things. The level of “things” and their interactions includes all neurons and their synaptic biological and chemical interactions.

      That’s the philosophical argument. Another argument is from the empirical evidence for psi, esp and the afterlife. If these things exist, as empirical evidence indicates, consciousness can’t be the result of physical processes in the brain, and therefore consciousness can’t be an emergent property of physical brain processes. 

      1. Further complicated by human
        Further complicated by human conditions like extreme autism/savantism which if subjected to a “human” Turing test would probably fail and appear to be purely mechanical.

        Further complicated by the realization of an “ESP machine” that demonstrates occult abilities due to some purely mechanical interaction. Of course, is there anything “purely mechanical?”

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