New Mars Forums

I don’t know. Jesus could have a Martian birthday as well.  I wonder how many Martian years it is since the birth of Christ. Is it exactly half?

I am not sure how the scale of size of a life form affects conciseness.  I could see there being a minimum size but as for maximum size I see it not as a limitation but as a reason for greater division between thought processes. Perhaps as the size of a mind increases it becomes more of a collective then a mind for reasons of efficiency.

I’m curious. How interested are people here in artificial intelligence and databases? I wanted to learn some stuff about Microsoft Access and artificial intelligence. I started creating a relational database:

http://www.geocities.com/s243a/iq/iq1.mdb
http://www.geocities.com/s243a/iq/iq1.zip

There is not much in the database right now and I am working on some forms to make data entry easier. The idea of the database is to only have one peace of information per table. Thus one table could be a table of types, another table of words and another table a table of links. Each row of each table has a unique index so you can refer to the table and row with only a single number. This makes it easier to express relationships and take advantage of the relationship features of Microsoft Access.

First I want to express relationships between data. Like for instance a cat is an animal or a cat is a noun. Once a bunch of relationships are built into the database I want to see if I can ask it questions and get back intelligent answers. Anyway, I can explain my design choices or take design suggestions if anyone is interested. That is I don’t mind being the teacher student or both.

From the story it sounds like it is quite a blow to astronomy. The first optical interferometry telescope being held back. As a consequence the technology is delayed on earth and in space. It is too bad all the people that made a fuss about the Hubble wouldn’t pay more attention to this because this technology is the future.

Perhaps the notion that the universe was the size of a pea is misleading. If every point of the universe was expanding at the same rate and near the speed of light then in every direction you would look the universe might look small but in reality wouldn’t be small because of near infinite length contraction.

I was thinking about adjectives like big. When we say something is big is it inherently big or big with respect to some set. Like if I say a big cat, do I mean a lion or a cat that is bigger then the average house cat? Is this ambiguity a strength or a weakness in languages? What challenge do such ambiguities present for computers dealing with languages. What kind of solutions do people foresee?

http://child-civilization.blogspot.com/ … guity.html

The reason I don’t think the “Wow” signal is that impressive is because a race advanced enough to send us a signal should have a more sophisticated way of sending it. I searched on Google the words in the title and here is one of the first articles I found:

"A Better Way to Search for ETI Signals
by Dr. Linas Vepstas <linas@linas.org>
April 2003

Abstract:
A better way to search for radio signals from extra-terrestrial intelligences is to look for PRN-encoded signals. Such encoding techniques offer powerful signal-to-noise improvements, making communication far, far more practical than using unencoded radio signals. This search technique will prove practical in the coming decades as Moore's Law provides the CPU cycles needed for such a search. ETI know Moore's Law, and depend on it to become intelligible.

Caution: This is an informal essay, a draft; conclusions in different parts of this text may contradict themselves. This is 'thinking aloud'/doodling with"
http://linas.org/theory/seti.html

See I don't get why the phytoplankton can't just move north if it likes the cold,

Perhaps time travel is such that all people that arrived from the future arrived from a different reality. Thus if a new reality is born from a person travailing back in time it is not essential for the same person to travel back to the same point in time within the new reality. In fact it is not even necessary of the person who traveled back in time that created this new reality to even be born in the time line of this new reality.

It is an interesting question if it is possible to have realities that are completely consistent in that the person who travels back in time to create the reality is born again in this new reality travels back in time and all events unfold in exactly the same way. Another thing to think about is if time travel is possible one might expect infinite realities and thus the probability of being born in a reality where there are no visitors from the future is zero. Of course lots of things happen which are probabilistically impossible. For instance the probability of us being born an any sufficiently small interval of time is vanishingly small.

Another question is if you travel back to the past how well can you use knowledge of the future to your advantage since each action you take to change the future can have dramatic effects on the future. Perhaps our reality is unstable and any perturbations of that reality lead to destruction. As a consequence all other realities are death sentences and that is why we exist in a reality where no one has visited us from the future.

Why would we move across the Galaxy at a fraction of C. The west was settled I’m sure slower then it would take someone to walk across it. Anyway, this is a fascinating discussion and although I’ve heard of Drakes equation before I have never heard before of estimating the probability of life based on expected rates of expansion. What a fascinating idea.

The article only makes sense since a reclined chair reduces the load on your spine because the chair supports some of your weight. There are of course drawbacks since taking weight off you back reduces mussel mass and bone density. An interesting article none the less. Now I can explain to my boss why it is important for me to lay back while I work.

http://www.greatdante.net/vulgari.html

It sounds like quite an interesting book

Maybe after I learn Spanish I’ll try Italian. I did want to learn mandarin and Arabic first but Italian could be easy to learn after learning Spanish as there looks to be a lot of written similarities. As you can tell I have grown more interested in languages lately. Part of my motivation is to be able to learn from original sources. My other motivation is I work in a very multicultural office.