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    Lovely personal remembrances of Stephen Hawking including one from me via my dad!

  • The 7 Minute Solution

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    I’m intrigued by the proliferation of explicitly time-based self-care plans, like the 7 Minute Workout. They aren’t a new phenomenon – we’ve had 30 day diets and things like NaNoWriMo for decades. But it feels like the duration of these plans are getting shorter and shorter. The Science Part of the change is surely due…

  • Sentience Footprint

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    I’m confident that in a hundred years, eating meat will be regarded in the negative way we now view racism or sexism – an ugly, demeaning, and unnecessary act. Like smoking, it will simply fall out of fashion because we’ll find better and healthier alternatives, although we’ll still occasionally eat humanely reared-and-killed animals. Note that…

  • Brain Training Games Don't Work

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    1 comment on Brain Training Games Don't Work

    A few days ago, 73 scientists signed a letter asserting that brain training games – which typically feature puzzle games and mental exercises on smartphones, tablets, PCs, or handheld devices – do not successfully increase general measures of intelligence or memory. I have long had my doubts about the efficacy of games like Brain Age…

  • How do we make a friendly AI?

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    How we do avoid creating a superhuman artificial intelligence (AI) that does not end up harming humanity? This is a question of great consequence to AI researchers and thinkers who believe that future AIs will have capabilities and will act in a way completely different and unfathomable to humans, just as our actions may seem…

  • A History of the Future in 100 Objects

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    1 comment on A History of the Future in 100 Objects

    Last year, I listened to a programme on Radio 4 called A History of the World in 100 Objects. It took 25 hours, or 1500 minutes. In the show, the BBC and the British Museum attempted to describe the entire span of human history through 100 objects – from a 2 million year-old Olduvai stone…

  • Total Fail at the Kinect Galleries

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    9 comments on Total Fail at the Kinect Galleries

    Update 3rd Sept: Shortly after I made this post, I got a nice email from someone running the Kinect Galleries campaign telling me they took the problems very seriously and were working to make sure they didn’t happen again – from the comments on this post, it sounds like that’s happened! I also went to…

  • Educational games from 3500 years ago

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    5 comments on Educational games from 3500 years ago

    Freeborn children [of Greece] should learn as much of these things as the vast throngs of young in Egypt do with their alphabet. First as regards arithmetic, lessons have been devised there for absolute beginners based on enjoyment and games, distributing apples and garlands so that the same numbers are divided among larger and smaller…

  • Reading on the iPad is fantastic

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    Reading on the iPad is fantastic. I don’t care what other people have said, I just know that after using it for a fortnight, I can tell that it’s changed the way I’ll read forever. I used to spend several hours a day in front of my iMac at home, using a combination of Google…

  • Meaning and Magic on a Disney Cruise: Part 2

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    1 comment on Meaning and Magic on a Disney Cruise: Part 2

    Read Part 1 here… Day 3: Valletta (Malta) Malta isn’t a place that I would go out of my way to visit. Its capital, Valletta, has plenty of charm and interesting architecture – a legacy from the incessant invasions and occupations by Greeks, Romans, Sicilians, French, British, and a bunch of other people you haven’t…