Undead Astronauts

update, ep 4. wow… who knew some powder could make everything look bad-freakin-ass?

some researchers have found a gene that appears to correlate with liberal political attitudes when coupled with an active adolescent social life.

By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects’ social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.

…

Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested in learning about their friends’ points of view. As a consequence, people with this genetic predisposition who have a greater-than-average number of friends would be exposed to a wider variety of social norms and lifestyles, which might make them more liberal than average. They reported that “it is the crucial interaction of two factors – the genetic predisposition and the environmental condition of having many friends in adolescence – that is associated with being more liberal.” The research team also showed that this held true independent of ethnicity, culture, sex or age.

lets remember that this is one study and many more would be needed to really confirm a finding like this. but if it holds up to scrutiny, parents could start picking this trait in their kids. rich parents would certainly have the wherewithal to pick or avoid this gene if they decided to have a kid in vitro. and for conservative parents, even if they didn’t decide to play god with their kid’s genes, they could still isolate his social life early on to lessen the chances of a liberal outlook.

scientists may also figure out how to deactivate the gene through drugs. these guys saw it coming from a mile away.

unfortunately, i can’t link the source article b/c the journal apparently doesn’t post their material online. Update: here’s the source paper.

the 2nd season of LXD has already arrived! man, that was fast. i was thinking it would take another year or something. finally we get some exposition. these dancers, these chosen are actually gifted with qi/chakra-like power. god, i love that flattop is one of the teachers. didn’t know he was still around. i wonder if they’ll have other O.G.s on eventually like wiggles or poppin pete. it could be like the rotating defense of against the dark arts teachers in harry potter.

Last night boxer played in the round of 64 beating his opponent (T) 2:0. GomTV estimates that close to 800,000 viewers logged onto their site to stream the matches. In both games, just when Boxer’s opponents would counter to Boxer’s base, the GomTV website would die due to the explosion of viewership. Numerous other sc websites and media sites also crashed due to Boxer’s matches. While popular user streams jumped to hold 12,000 viewers, tripling their previous records. The GomTV website downtime angered Koreans so much that “Zoo Gallery, Dusan Bears (Korean Baseball Team) Gallery, other Korean Baseball team galleries, and other sites with gallery’s that had anything to do with bears (Korean word for bear is Gom) were bombarded with insults and profanities.”

Oh and the games were pretty amazing too, looks like Boxer was holding back his real skills in previous replays as I suspected.

http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=161828

Here is a link to the first game of the match

http://www.sc2rep.com/replays/show?id=2211

Here is game 2

http://www.sc2rep.com/replays/show/id/2212

mind uploading has been a staple of science fiction for decades. a precursor to that is a beta level sim, or a non-sentient version of yourself that can approximate some aspect of your personality and behavior. this too has been science fiction… until now.

a huntsville based firm called intellitar (intelligent avatar) is now offering what they call virtual eternity. their website features rather creepy looking asexual avatars with incandescent eyes (one would think they’d want to humanize rather than digitize the avatars). anyways, they claim to offer a digital avatar of yourself that will act the way you act based on your personalized input. it will simulate your appearance and voice in a real-time conversation and when faced with a question it cannot answer, it will ping the question back to the human source and use that answer the next time it gets that question.

i’m sure no one is super impressed at this very rudimentary attempt, which is basically an expensive parlor trick. but the point is that someone is actually attempting it now. if, in the future, we start carrying hardware around that will automatically record our responses to stimuli, i think we could start getting pretty sophisticated sims. imagine a sim that had an entire life’s worth of data as a source. even as a non-sentient sim, your descendants might be able to get a few nuggets of wisdom with tales from way before they were alive. this is just a small step towards the holy grail of uploading of course, but it is a step.

big tourney this weekend. daigo, jwong, & gamerbee will all be in attendance. there’s gonna be a 5v5 of US and international all-stars. i’m pretty sure the US is gonna get waxed. here are the teams:

EG.jwong, EG.marn, mike ross, arturo sanchez, DMG.pr balrog

vs

daigo (jp), gamerbee (tw), momochi (jp), choco blanka (jp), starnab (fr)

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an article today has me wondering if the west should cede development of artificial consciousness (AC) to the east. i pose this question due solely to cultural considerations while overlooking any capability questions. i also say consciousness rather than intelligence b/c there’s already plenty of AI around that doesn’t necessarily impact the area i’m concerned with.

the article mentions that robot development differs in the east and west b/c the programmers in the respective cultures tend to prize different aspects of social interaction. westerners in general tend to prize individuality while easterners prize interdependence.

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