Say What...

I just noticed that since my baysian spamfilter unexpected stopped working three days ago, I haven't gotten ONE piece of spam!

What gives? I used to get 5-10 a day, 99.9% of which got caught by my filter. 

I suppose I could always reinstall my filter to try and get it working again, but I don't currently feel like there's such a big need for it...

Sleepazoid.

Well, I had trouble falling asleep last night. I prolly conked out around 5:00 or 6:00 am. So, sleeping until 2:00 can be seen either as a good thing (8 hours sleep) or as a bad thing (where did the morning go?).

Anyway, I is the awake now. Now I just have to figure out what I plan to do with whats left of the day.

People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid

A surprising article from wired starts:

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. [...] we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and viral cells.

The surprising part is not that this is true, I would expect anyone with even a basic knowledge of biology to know this, but that scientists are only now getting around to investigating it. Have the tools for research not been heretofore available, has medicine and biology overlooked the whole human ecoshpere, or is it just another case of bad reporting? I gotta wonder.

Tit-for-Tat defeated!

For the first time since Axelrod first investigated strategies for solving an iterated prisoners dilemma, somone has produced a strategy (called Southampton) which beats Tit-for-Tat. The secret was to use a fixed set of initial responses so that agents using the Southampton strategy could identify themselves. Then one of the agents would sacrifice itself to provide maximum benefit to the other agent. In the end, a few of the submitted southampton agents scored at the very top of the list, beating Tit-for-tat, while all the rest ended up on the bottom.  You are free to draw your own conclusions as to what this means in terms of cooperation within societies.

More info here.

Robin Hanson's Really Big Thing.

In Robin Hanson's article The Next Really Big Enormous Thing he tries to analyze changes in economic growth rates over time, and to predict what changes may lay ahead. I'm not sure I agree completely with his methodology, but I like his conclusion:

If a new growth transition were to be similar to the last few, in terms of the number of doublings and the increase in the growth rate, then the remarkable consistency in the previous transitions allows a remarkably precise prediction. A new growth mode should arise sometime within about the next seven industry mode doublings (i.e., the next seventy years) and give a new [world] wealth doubling time of between seven and sixteen days. Such a new mode would surely count as “the next really big enormous thing.

He then goes on to attempt to determine what sort of innovation might lead to this. His conclusion is Strong AI. Its interesting that he didn't mention a mature nanotechnology, but then again since I consider Strong AI to be a necessary enabler for mature nanotech, I can hardly fault him for that.

4-D Universe from Quantum Foam Constraints.

I'm not sure how to summarize this, nor even if its as (ultimately) an interesting result as it appears at first glance. To put it simply, most models of quantum foam predict either a 2-D or an infintely-dimensioned universe. Now though, some folks have gotten 3D space + Time by imposing some constraints on the quantums of foam. Namely, that C is still a speed limit at that scale, and that causality is never violated. Why these constraints seem necessary is an interesting question.

Quantum Enzymes.

In another one of those I'm-surprised-this-is-a-surprise announcements, researches have found that some enzymes work as catalysts, not by helping molecules surmount energy barriers, but assist them in quantum-tunnelling through them.