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I think the greatest creation of humanity, the greatest achievement, the highest we can aspire, is comedy, humor, and laughter.
Study after study shows that success, good health, and satisfaction result from happiness. Happiness is the cause of all the good things we want in our lives.
DWave Systems is on the verge of a fundamental revoluation in computing. Everytime sombody claims it's a scam someone with cred proves them wrong. Here's an article from Google.
It will be a long time before we can 3D print a full integrated circuit, the registration requirements will require laser interferometers. But many useful circuits will not require sub-micron scale features.
http://futurism.com/thanks-nasa-can-now-use-plasma-print-nanoelectronics/
Here are a few more articles discussing the use of transcranial stimulation to treat Asperger's. We are on the cusp of a revolution in neurotherapy. In a few years patients will go to brain therapy clinics as frequently as they go to physical therapy today.
Another exciting idea is to combine nutritional and/or drug dosages with transcranial stimulation. Just as physical therapy can repair a frozen shoulder, neurostimulation will be able to repair cognitive impairment and degradation.
So here's my thought on a few supplements in order of priority
1 Vitamin D
2 Magnesium Citrate
3 Flaxseed Oil
4 A good multivitamin (with no metals)
5 2 grams of Vitamin C
6 Ubiquinol (soluble form of CoQ10)
7 A powerful antioxidant (like acetyl-glutathione)
8 Calcium
9 Folic Acid
10 B-12
So what should be added? How about a healthy sleep formula?
Ian Tregillis has written the first 2 books in his trilogy entitled "The Alchemy Wars". The books are The Mechanical and The Rising. He presents a disturbing view of free will, where a simple mechanical operation on a human brain can remove free will.
His writing style is hypnotic and his use of the English language is superb. I eagerly await the conclusion.
I wish that Ray and Terry were more forthcoming about optimal nutritional supplements instead of just offering a few hundred different options. My guess is there are legal issues with recommending specific compounds and dosages.
If I were going to take one and only one supplement what should I take? Or what if I only wanted to take 2 supplements?
I think the answer is Vitamin D first, then magnesium second (preferably as the citrate form to enhance absorption). So what is third? Omega-3 oils or Vitamin C or CoQ-10 (as ubiquinol)? I'm willing to take about 10 pills per day, but not 40. So which 10 would you recommend?
I understand that some of this depends on deficiencies, and everyone is different. But it would be easy to make a recommendation in the case of no deficiency. So what would be the top 10 supplements to take for a person with no deficiencies?
Here's a great sketch from XKCD showing the distances involved in searching for new planets.
If the fossil fuel companies are smart they will move into energy storage and distribution. If they are dumb they will try to block this transition with legislation.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2014/09/19/the-coming-era-of-unlimited-and-free-clean-energy/
I just wish we could have have achieved this with superchimneys.
Last summer Tim Dettmers published "The Brain vs Deep Learning Part I: Computational Complexity" an in-depth analysis of the computational power of the human mind, and also of the future trends in high performance computing (HPC). He makes a strong argument that not only have we underestimated the computing power of a human brain, we have also overestimated the growth potential of HPC.
I found this to be one of the most serious and extensive blog posts I have ever seen. I also thought his topics were interesting and relevant for the Singularity.
In the end he presented no obvious reason that the Singularity is impossible, or so far in the future we don't need to discuss it. His analysis predicts the Singularity may be decades or even a century further in the future than Ray Kurzweil has predicted. So we may not live to see it, especially if all we have are CMOS transistors to get there.
But if Optalysys or D-Wave or other new platforms are successful we should have the opportunity to see it, especially if we use Ray Kurzweil's methods for life-extension.
Would you trust your retirement plan to a robot? In the future you may not have a choice because all the human advisors are unemployed.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/the-robots-are-coming-for-wall-street.html
I thought it was still science fiction but a Google search shows multiple medical studies which combine virtual reality with transcranial stimulation.
Effects of the addition of transcranial direct current stimulation to virtual reality therapy
Combination transcranial direct current stimulation and virtual reality therapy
Effects of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation combined with virtual reality
And it looks like Neuroelectrics is on the verge of commercializing it.
So how soon will Facebook, Microsoft, or Apple combine a virtual reality helmet with transcranial stimulation? Look for small companies like Neuroelectrics to be acquired by the major players in virtual reality.
I wonder how much of snoring is due to weak and flabby muscles at the back of the throat? If those muscles were toned and strong would that help reduce or eliminate snoring?
I'm trying a test. About 10 times per day I do a few very strong swallows. The idea is to build up muscle strength by exercising the back of my throat. I'm going to do this for a few weeks to see if it reduces my snoring.
If we could create a wormhole at an arbitrary position we could prolong the lifetime of a star to nearly infinity. All we need to do is open a small wormhole at the center of the star and put the end out in empty space. A steady flow of helium rich material would stream out preventing the helium from building up to the point where the star begins creating lithium and carbon.
At some point the mass of the star would drop too much and we would then open a wormhole into the core of a gas giant like Jupiter. The other end of the wormhole could be opened at the surface of the star and hydrogen rich material would accumulate at the surface creating a continuous flow of hydrogen from the surface towards the fusion core.
I wonder if any jets in Active Galactic Nuclei are artificial. They could be evidence of advanced species who are extending the lifetime of their star to trillions of years. The composition of those jets might match the stellar core material of an older star.
The Nervana stereo headphones deliver electrical pulses to the vagus nerve to induce feelings of calm and relaxation. Even their advertising image looks like the Singularity. Here is one review.
Ray Kurzweil claims we are on the verge of medical immortality where the life expectancy of the elderly increases more than one year every year, pushing death further away each year we live.
I have claimed that today a 100 year old human has a life expectancy of only one year and this number has changed very little in the past few millennia. This report indicates the value is closer to 2.5 years. If Ray Kurzweil is right this number is increasing significantly.
If major changes were occurring in this area then we should see a dramatic increase in the number of people over 110. But we don't. It is extremely rare to find someone over 110, And considering the large population of our planet it might even be harder to live to 110 today than it was 100 years ago.
Medical immortality is unreachable until the life expectancy of centenarians begins to increase dramatically.
Ray Kurzweil is correct about one aspect of this discussion, the odds of living to be 100 years old are increasing every year and I agree that the number of centenarians will rise every year. It's very reasonable to think that in a few decades everyone should expect to live to be 100. But then they will have to accept that they probably won't make it to see 110.
A few years ago I read about an equation which Homer Simpson pondered. It was a Fermat near miss (FNM), an equation which almost satisfies Fermat's Last theorem. Here is an example I found a few days ago. It's a cubic equation which misses satisfying Fermat's Last Theorem by a very small error.
491933 + 509203 = 630863
The sum of the 2 cubes on the left is 251072400480057. The cube root of the sum = 63085.9999999994. The error is 0.0000000006
In more precise terms, an FNM is a pair of integers raised to an exponent n, and their sum is almost exactly the nth root of an integer. I wrote a perl script to find these Fermat misses. Some of them are quite interesting. A trivial miss is where a>>b so b^n ~ 0.00 and a = c. A prime miss is where all 4 numbers a,b,c, and n are prime. David X Cohen worked hard to find a FNM which does not violate parity.
My perl script uses double precision floating point numbers so the relative error is limited to 1e-16. Noam Elkies at Harvard has apparently written a more precise program because he finds FNM which have errors far below 1e-16.
While this is simply a mathematical curiosity I wonder at the implications that FNM can be found to any arbitrary precision. For example, suppose we wanted to find a FNM with an error of 1 over google, 1e-100. Is there any reason this is not possible? Just as we can prove that 0.9999..... = 1.000... I wonder about the implications of a FNM with an infinite number of digits. It's amazing to think that Fermat's Last Theorem can be violated to any arbitrary but finite precision with no harm or foul to mathematical rules.
If we are ever invaded by aliens there are 3 primary motivations which probably apply to them just as well as to humans.
3rd Power: They want to dominate/enslave/exterminate us
2nd Sex: They want to have sex with us
1st Money: No they don't want our money. But they do want our gold. Few people outside of the astrophysics community understand just how rare gold really is in this universe. We are gold rich relative to just about every other location in the universe.
So if aliens invade and it's not clear what they want, they probably want our gold.