ARPANET

— The panel of the very first Interface Message Processor (IMP). This one was used at the UCLA Boelter 3420 lab to transmit the first message on the Internet

The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was an early packet-switching network and the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was initially funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) of the United States Department of Defense to ensure military communications in the event of a nuclear attack. By using packet-switching to disassemble data into addressed parcels, blip them over high-speed lines, and reassemble them just before they reach their destination, ARPANET rendered itself invulnerable to conventional attack; if a portion of the network went down, traffic would automatically be rerouted.

Kardashev scale

— Energy consumption estimated in three types of civilizations defined by Kardashev scale

The Kardashev scale is a method of measuring a civilization's level of technological advancement based on the amount of energy a civilization is able to use. It was proposed by Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev in 1964. The scale has three designated categories:

A Type I civilization—also called a planetary civilization—can use and store all of the energy available on its planet.

A Type II civilization—also called a stellar civilization—can harness the total energy of its planet's parent star (the most popular hypothetical concept being the Dyson sphere—a device which would encompass the entire star and transfer its energy to the planet(s)).

A Type III civilization—also called a galactic civilization—can control energy on the scale of its entire host galaxy.

Predatory Coevolution

The Mountain's Goat climbing ability

This animal is a sure-footed climber commonly seen on cliffs and ice.

Daily movement patterns reflect an individual's needs for foraging, resting, thermoregulation and security from predators or disturbance.

Neuromancer

Title: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Year of publishing: 1984 

William Gibson's debut novel Neuromancer gained a cult-status very soon after its publishing by being one of the first novels in a new science-fiction genre called Cyberpunk. So it has become "the definitive cyberpunk book" and the most famous cyberpunk novel of all the time. Neuromancer was book of the year 1984 in the USA, and it also gained 3 sci-fi literature awards: the Hugo, the 1984 Nebula, and the 1985 Philip K. Dick Memorial Awards.

Faust: Margaret's Question

Margaret:

Promise me, Heinrich!

Battle of Tours: Islam in Europe

– Charles de Steuben's Bataille de Poitiers en octobre 732 romantically depicts a triumphant Charles Martel (mounted) facing Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi (right) at the Battle of Tours.

The Battle of Tours (10 October 732)—also called the Battle of Poitiers and, by Arab sources, the Battle of the Highway of the Martyrs marked the victory of the Frankish and Burgundian forces under Charles Martel over the invasion forces of the Umayyad Caliphate led by Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, Governor-General of al-Andalus. It was fought in an area between the cities of Poitiers and Tours, in the Aquitaine of west-central France, near the village of Moussais-la-Bataille, about 20 kilometres (12 mi) northeast of Poitiers. The location of the battle was close to the border between the Frankish realm and the then-independent Duchy of Aquitaine under Odo the Great.

Aldous Huxley: The Art of Seeing

Basic Principle Underlying the Practice of Every Art

Whatever the art you may wish to learn, whether it be acrobatics or violin playing, mental prayer or golf, acting, singing, dancing or what you will-there is one thing that every good teacher will always say: Learn to combine relaxation with activity; learn to do what you have to do without strain; work hard, but never under tension.

Language Is A Virus From Outer Space

Extract from The Electronic Revolution. By William S. Burroughs:

In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was flesh... human flesh... In the beginning of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not write. They cannot make information available to future generations or to animals outside the range of their communication system. This is the crucial distinction between men and other animals. WRITING.

Doubling Time Theory

"The theory of the Doubling of Time has begun to be known within the scientific community. But few are those who look how this can help humanity. I live in many simultaneous time lines. A time line we know, and another time line which we do not know but which we use continuously. That means the perception of time changes. The Doubling of Time is actually the doubling of the perception of time. That means we benefit all the time from two different perceptions of time, which allows us to do things in a very fast manner in a time line which does not exist for me. That means we do a slow analysis within another time line and within our time line we only receive the synthesis. This allows us to have intuition and instinct which help us to live well or better. Above all we must use this while we are sleeping, because sleeping exists for this reason. And we do not know this. The first text I have found on how we should sleep is from VII b.c., beyond any religious or philosophical principle, as it is a text from Pythagoras. So this was taught seven centuries before Christ, but now nobody knows about it."

Drexciya Interview — James Stinson

Rare Interview with Liz Copeland (May 2002). A truly inspiring interview from an individual dedicated 100% to his artform. James Stinson died in Sept 2002, only a matter of months after this interview, aged just 32. His aquatic universes will live forever.

Arthur C. Clarke: The Ultimate Melody

– Attic funerary statue of a Siren, playing on a tortoiseshell lyre, c. 370 BC

Have you ever noticed that, when there are twenty or thirty people talking together in a room, there are occasional moments when everyone becomes suddenly silent, so that for a second there’s a sudden, vibrating emptiness that seems to swallow up all sound? I don’t know how it affects other people, but when it happens it makes me feel cold all over. Of course, the whole thing’s merely caused by the laws of probability, but somehow it seems more than a mere coinciding of conversational pauses. It’s almost as if everybody is listening for something—they don’t know what. At such moments I say to myself:

Deep Reinforcement Learning Agent (DQN) playing Atari Breakout

This video illustrates the improvement in the performance of the DQN agent over training (i.e. after 100, 200, 400 and 600 episodes). After 600 episodes DQN agent finds and exploits the optimal strategy in this game, which is to make a tunnel around the side, and then allow the ball to hit blocks by bouncing behind the wall. Note: the score is displayed at the top left of the screen (maximum for clearing one screen is 448 points), number of lives remaining is shown in the middle (starting with 5 lives), and the “1” on the top right indicates this is a 1-player game.

In the video below you can see all the actions running in the Convolutional Neural Network.

The code was implemented by Nathan Sprague and can be downloaded from here:

https://github.com/spragunr/deep_q_rl

It follows the paper "Playing Atari with Deep Reinforcement Learning" by Volodymyr Mnih, Koray Kavukcuoglu, David Silver, Alex Graves, Ioannis Antonoglou, Daan Wierstra and Martin Riedmiller that you can get from:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.5602


— Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning:
https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/dqn/DQNNaturePaper.pdf
— Open source implementation is available on GitHub:
https://github.com/deepmind/dqn

Superintelligence [Technological Singularity]

Collapse model: Triangle (3-Dimensional Space)

– Imaginative illustration from Wave Process

The technological singularity is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial superintelligence (ASI) will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable changes to human civilization.

Eight O’Clock in the Morning

– Scene from They Live (1988)

At the end of the show the hypnotist told his subjects, “Awake.”

Something unusual happened.

Intention

"I'll tell you very plainly how i see the relationship between an artist and his audience by telling you a little story that i heard many years ago and that made quite an impression on me. You see, during the Middle Ages, a certain wood-carver in China was given the task of crafting a stand for the temple bells. It was a very honorable assignment for this Chinese wood-carver, and he set about his work. While he carved he started thinking about all the money he'd earn for this bell stand, and as it happened the carving turned out quite poorly. But since he was an ambitious Chinese craftsman, he started all over again. But this time too, as he carved, he started thinking about how he would win everyone's love with this incredible beautiful stand, and this attempt was a failure as well. So he destroyed that stand and started a third time. But this time it occurred to him that he would gain immortality with this bell stand, and his third attempt was a failure too. With that, our Chinese wood-carver grew as furious as only a Chinese wood-carver can be, and he decided to try a fourth time. This time he had just one thought in his head: to create a bell stand. This time he succeeded and in so doing gained love, money, and immortality."

— Interview with Ingmar Bergman, speaking about the relationship between an artist and his audience (The Magician, 1958)

The Library of Babel

"The Library of Babel" is a short story by Argentine author and librarian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), conceiving of a universe in the form of a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format and character set. The story was originally published in Spanish in Borges' 1941 collection of stories (The Garden of Forking Paths).

The story repeats the theme of Borges' 1939 essay "The Total Library" ("La Biblioteca total"), which in turn acknowledges the earlier development of this theme by Kurd Lasswitz in his 1901 story "The Universal Library". Certain examples that Aristotle attributes to Democritus and Leucippus clearly prefigure it, but its belated inventor is Gustav Theodor Fechner, and its first exponent, Kurd Lasswitz. In his book The Race with the Tortoise (Berlin, 1919), Dr Theodor Wolff suggests that it is a derivation from, or a parody of, Ramón Llull's thinking machine. The elements of his game are the universal orthographic symbols, not the words of a language.

Eternal return

Eternal return (also known as eternal recurrence) is a theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. The theory is found in Indian philosophy and in ancient Egypt and was subsequently taken up by the Pythagoreans and Stoics. With the decline of antiquity and the spread of Christianity, the theory fell into disuse in the Western world, with the exception of Friedrich Nietzsche, who connected the thought to many of his other concepts, including amor fati. Eternal return relates to the philosophy of predeterminism in that people are predestined to continue repeating the same events over and over again.

Introduction to Superposition

"The task is, not so much to see what no one has yet seen; but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees." – Erwin Schrödinger

— Lectures from MIT 8.04 Quantum Physics I, Spring 2013
View the complete series of lectures
Instructor: Allan Adams

Definition of meme

~ 48:20

"A word has been invented, "meme" – a meme is not the smallest unit of heredity. A meme is the smallest unit of meaning, of an idea. Ideas are made of memes. And I think the art community might function with more efficiency, in a production of visionary aesthetic breakthroughs, if we would think of ourselves as an environment modeled after the natural environment, where we as artists are tempting to create memes which enter an environment of other memes that are in competition with each other, and out of this competition of memes ever more appropriate, adaptive and suitable ideas can gather and link themselves together into higher and higher organisms."

— Terence McKenna, Opening the Doors of Creativity (1990)

Ouroboros [Rebirth]

– A copy of a 1478 drawing by Theodoros Pelecanos of an alchemical tract, attributed to Synesius

The Ouroboros or uroborus ophis is an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in ancient Egyptian iconography, the ouroboros entered western tradition via Greek magical tradition and was adopted as a symbol in Gnosticism and Hermeticism and most notably in alchemy. The term derives from Ancient Greek: οὐροβόρος, from οὐρά (oura), "tail" + βορά (bora), "food", from βιβρώσκω (bibrōskō), "I eat". 

Love your slavery

~ 10:10

"I think this kind of dictatorship of the future, I think will be very unlike the dictatorships which we've been familiar with in the immediate past. I mean, take another book prophesying the future, which was a very remarkable book, George Orwell's "1984." Well, this book was written at the height of the Stalinist regime, and just after the Hitler regime, and there he foresaw a dictatorship using entirely the methods of terror, the methods of physical violence. Now, I think what is going to happen in the future is that dictators will find, as the old saying goes, that you can do everything with bayonets except sit on them! But, if you want to preserve your power indefinitely, you have to get the consent of the ruled, and this they will do partly by drugs as I foresaw in "Brave New World," partly by these new techniques of propaganda. They will do it by bypassing the sort of rational side of man and appealing to his subconscious and his deeper emotions, and his physiology even, and so, making him actually love his slavery. I mean, I think, this is the danger that actually people may be, in some ways, happy under the new regime, but that they will be happy in situations where they oughtn't to be happy. "

— The Mike Wallace Interview: Aldous Huxley (1958)