think or thwim

Bloxorz is a good puzzle game.

:: Kottke.org

From the BBC:

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

It’s a little sensational, but how else are they going to get people to watch a documentary about mathematicians? I could have done without that, but it is still good.

:: Cosmology Curiosity

I put the equivalent gasoline fuel efficiency of the major modes of transportation in one graph to get a feel for where they fall relative to one another. The loading assumption makes a big difference, but I think this is a reasonable approximation.

Typical loads are roughly:

Car = 1.5 passengers
Subway = 95% full
Airplane = 80% full
Train = 80% full
Bus = 70% full

:: Wikipedia :: James Strickland

Pac Car II

If you’ve never seen this car and you’re like me you’re thinking two things right now:

Thing 1: 12,000 miles per gallon? Bullshit. This guy is either an idiot or can’t type.
Thing 2: That looks like a bad-ass car.

Continue Reading »

Ken Gumbs takes a different approach in his documentary about the singularity (when machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence). Most film makers would spend half of the movie predicting when it could happen, Ray Kurzweil style. Gumbs skips that and gets right to the big questions. What is life? What is intelligence? What does it mean to be human? What is a soul? How will human society deal with the difference between those who go cyborg and those who don’t? What use will super intelligent machines have for humans? Fascinating stuff.

Gumbs interviews Hugo de Garis, Kevin Warwick, Anne Foerst, and Nick Bostrom. The rough cut is available at Google Video:

He’s about to get started on his next film about living forever.

4 Door Films