Nuttiest Research Paper In A While

This is exactly the sort of research the Academy of Lagado would publish today:

New Approach to Financial Time Series Forecasting - Quantum Minimization Regularizing BWGC and NGARCH Composite Model

I partcularily appreciate the matter-of-factness they present the results from their (claimed) application of Hoyer's Quantum Algorithm in table 1.

W2V2 Part 3: Hello Kitty Car

Old enough to drive.

Young enough to crave Hello Kitty merchandise.

Choose one. Can't have both.


The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

Immune Epitope Database Of Unspeakable Horrors

The problem with reading Lovecraft is that, after a while, peptide sequences start looking decidedly demonic. Look, as an illustration, on the following sequence from Herpes virus:

YIWPRNDYDGFLENAHEHHG

Definitely Lovecraftian.

" As he translated the inscription at the bottom of the monstrous winged tentacled statue, I felt the blood draining from my face. " The Elder Evil ! " I whispered, " the amorph god of the deep, mentioned in folk lore of certain degenerate Papuan tribes - YIWPRNDYDGFLENAHEHHG ! "

Try for yourself:

http://immuneepitope.org/

"Why have engineers ignored results and knowledge of psychoanalysis ? " Well, there's a hell of a good reason.

To whom it may concern.

The upcoming "1st international Engineering and Neuro-Psychoanalysis forum" in Vienna, Austria was prominently featured by Austria's state- sponsored news agency today.

It is my opinion that the presentation of psycho- analysis as a discipline relevant to, and respected by, the AI community, is damaging to the scientific integrity of AI in general and AGI in particular.

Unfortunately, this event makes for a good news story, and will undoubtedly receive an amount of coverage widely disproportionate to its scientific relevance or novelty.
The resulting disinformation among politicians, grant agencies and the general public will, in my opinion, work to the disadvantage of AI researchers who seriously attempt to integrate (neuro-)psychological findings into their projects.

Participants of this conference have already implied that they will apply for Austrian state and industry grants. To me, as a "local", it seems very well plausible that a substantial fraction of these applications will be successful, meaning those ideas would be around for years to come, well funded, and well established within the (local) academia.

As far as I can see, neither the decades-long history of the field of affective computing (A. Ortony, C. Elliott, R. Picard..), nor the field of AGI itself have been explicitly acknowledged in interviews or on the conference's web page. Participants might still do so in their presentations and publications. If this silence is, however, kept, (be it the result of ignorance or deliberation) life (at least in Austria) will undoubtedly become somewhat more difficult for those scientists who wish to present their grant proposals with respect to the above mentioned fields.

If you think this is worrisome, and requires action, I'd suggest :

- informing concerned researchers and activists

- possibly delivering a statement to the Austrian ministry of science, the largest grant agencies in Austria, and the news, possibly signed by a number of AI researchers working in relevant fields, making clear that even though there's far from a consensus on how the mind works, there's definitely a consensus out there that the mind isn't working according to psychoanalytic theory.

Modeling of the affective-cognitive interplay is a vigorous and sound research discipline, especially when based on neurobiological insights. It is my impression that reaching out to a subdiscipline of psychology generally regarded as pseudoscience (to use a more printable word) is a challenge to the scientific integrity and respectability of this research paradigm.

sincerely

Manuel Moertelmaier

W2V2 Part 2: Rudimentary Plug-In Hybrid

Yes, we Austrians know about jumper cables. But why not do something nice to the environment once in a while and recharge a dead battery from the grid ?


The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

The World's Most Beautiful Supercomputer

The Mare Nostrum supercomputer at the Centro Nacional de Super- computacion, Barcelona, is currently the most powerful supercomputer in Europe, featuring 2560 JS21 blade computing nodes, each with 2 dual-core IBM 64-bit PowerPC 970MP pro- cessors running at 2.3 GHz for 10240 CPUs in total. Residing in a former chapel named Torre Girona, it's undoubtedly an impressive sight. In fact, it would make an excellent real-world incarnation of transhuman AI Golem XIV from Polish SF writer S. Lem's 1973 book Imaginary Magnitude. ImMag, definitely one of the most underrated works by Lem (himself easily qualifying the most underrated among SF writers), casually introduces motives like superintelligent AI, recursive self-enhancement, auto- evolution, synthetic biology, the impossibility of controlling AI with injunctions, and Dawkins' selfish genes - three years before Dawkins himself did so. Oh, and BTW, the book consists mainly of a collection of forewords - but isn't all science fiction a foreword of sorts?
ImMag was the book that introduced me to transhumanism in 1996, and when I later worked through the more popular works on transhumanism, I often found myself thinking "well, isn't this all incredibly old hat ? Haven't SF authors been elaborating on such themes since the Sixties ?" No, by and large, they haven't. Just a guy in Poland, working in isolation, wrote stories on self-replicating nanomachines. the Singularity, and pompous supercomputers.

W2V2 Part 1: Furry Bike

The Ainu among bikes ? A tribute to Meret Oppenheim ? Or maybe just a way of proudly stating "I really, really love things *furry*." OK, let's better not pursue that last line of thought any further.


The Wondrous World of Vogelweiderplatz Vehicles is a series of snapshots I recently took on Vogelweiderplatz - just around the corner from where I live - a place where people seem to have a taste for extravagant vehicles.

Seven Deadly Haibane

This is basically correct.
The correct pairing, however, is in fact:

Nemu <-> sloth
Reki <-> pride
Hikari <-> gluttony
Kana <-> greed
Kuu <-> envy
Midori <-> wrath
Hyouko <-> lust

In a TV interview, ABe implied the existence of several Easter
Eggs in HR.What I can come up quickly with is this. Maybe
the world needs www.HaibaneRenmeiOverinterpretation.org ?

Recursive Hickory Smoke

So, the sad truth is that natural hickory smoke flavor is nothing else than maltodextrin. Maybe someone should sue that company for putting their customer's mind into an infinite loop. Well, there's always the option of a reset. (If you live in Greece, that is.)

Journal Impact Factor And Length Of Title

All scientists dream of publishing in a journal that has a short title. The temptation of monosyllabicism is simply irresistible. Of course, fewer characters in a journal name also make it easier to write it down, and therefore articles in those journals get more references. Am I serious ? No. But this plot, created from a list of impact factors, shows that Acta Obsc., at nine characters, might not be such a bad choice for you after all.

A Very Small Sea Of LCL

I had never before realized how much cell culture medium looks like LCL. A subtle reference by Anno ? Or am I overinterpreting here ? Maybe it's because I spent too much time recently helping out here. Anyway, where did I put my orange glasses ?