Lovely:
# tired 5 am adam suggests you scrap the ensuing block and rewrite it while you are freshthen again, he failed at writing queue tonight, so maybe his advice isn't great
i will hit him for you
A comment in my code.
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Tag Archives: philosophy
An interesting extrapolation from the Fermi Paradox
Nick Bostrom of Oxford University has written a damn interesting paper arguing that finding traces of alien life would be a very bad omen for humanity. He accepts the Fermi Paradox as a paradox and makes some very interesting deductions regarding a ‘Great Filter’ preventing the rise of space faring alien civilizations.
Read the paper. (Really).
And here’s a reddit thread about the paper which points out some of the unstated assumptions.
Other related things of interest:
- Video of Michio Kaku arguing that SETI’s hitherto corroboration of the null hypothesis does not reinforce the Fermi Paradox.
- Wikipedia entry for Nick Bostrom
- The Last Question by Isaac Asimov. A superb short story about the inevitability presented by entropy.
- Wikipedia entry on the Great Filter hypothesis.
- Wikipedia entry on Von Neumann probes.
Privacy
A few of days ago I rehashed the privacy-security debate with a couple of friends. We were talking at least tangentially about the privacy rights of politicians and those in the public eye. The conversation culminated with one of us asking, with the caveat that he understood that it was desirable, how the idea of a right to privacy evolved in the first place. I think this is a rather interesting question. Continue reading