vanderveeken.org

New on the internet: vanderveeken.org. Currently displays my blog when you click my name, until I undertake making more of it.

Daleks to victory!

I realised that the BBC has created a large body of Sci-fi series in the past decades up until today: The Hitch Hiker's Guide, Blaker's 7, Doctor Who.

From the recent new Doctor Who episodes there is a beautiful poster now on sale featuring a USSR-style aggressive robot, a Dalek. I'd love to have this poster on my wall!

Edge.org - for inspiring reading

I am a great fan of Edge.org, a network of creative thinkers on life and empirical science. John Brockman is behind many of the great interviews.

Read here an excerpt from Edge.org newsletter 321, from the article DREAM-LOGIC, THE INTERNET AND ARTIFICIAL THOUGHT by David Gelernter, professor of computer science at Yale and chief scientist at Mirror Worlds Technologies:

"It's also reasonable to expect computers to help clean up the mess they have made. They dump huge quantities of information into the cybersphere every day. Can they also help us evaluate this information intelligently? Or are they mere uncapped oil wells pumping out cyber-pollution — which is today just a distraction but might slowly, gradually paralyze us, as our choices and information channels proliferate out of control?"

Note the reference to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill: "Or are they mere uncapped oil wells pumping out cyber-pollution ... ?".

Also, the word cyber is associated with the negative word polution. This was remarked by an author I read of some time ago, but it's true. Words like cyber-crime, cyber-terrorism are often found in newsarticles on internet-related crime. Therefore I think it's wise not to talk about cybernetics anymore to people who are not in the know. Unfortunately.

Science-fiction: Metalosis maligna, ethically eery

For the engineers, science fiction fans and alike, the following very realistic fiction-documentary by Floris Kaayk may be interesting.

The documentary is called Metalosis maligna. Although it's been out since 2006, I would love to have a short debate with students in the context of an engineering-ethics class.

First time I saw it was at Eindhoven University of Technology in an animated art display in the main building.

Childhood facinations rediscovered

Some particular images from childhood have stayed on my mind ever since. Here is a little list of them:

Strandbeesten
Strandbeesten (beach animals), which are mechanical constructions made of PVC tubes and PET bottles which can propagate over a beach only using the force of the wind. The creator applies an evolutionary approach in creating new machines, favouring properties that make the current machines succesfull in successive generations.

I saw recordings of these creatures on television, on a children's news show.

Cooperating LEGO-robots
In the late 1990's, in the AI-lab of Luc Steels at the Vrije Univeriteit Brussel, a project ran using autonomous mobile LEGO-robots in an artificial but physical environment. The goals of the project was to study the evolution of meaning in such a simplified environment. See for example the paper "Perceptiual grounding in robots" by Paul Vogt 1998

I was about 10 years old back then, building machines using LEGO by myself, although my machines were not endowed with the sofisticated kind of controllers that the Belgian robots were. Seeing these robots drive around stimulated my interest in programming, which led me to pursue a Bachelor's degree in computer science about 10 years later.

NTFS on MacOS

It's quite easy, just download: http://mac.softpedia.com/progDownload/NTFS-3G-Download-24268.html

Computing 99999!

GHCi, version 6.10.4: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ :? for help
Loading package ghc-prim ... linking ... done.
Loading package integer ... linking ... done.
Loading package base ... linking ... done.
"computing 99999!" [Waiting for 5 minutes]
282422940796034787429342157802453551847749492609122485057891808654297795090106301787255177141383116361071361173736196295147499618312391802272607340909383242200555696886678403803773794449612683801478751119669063860449261445381113700901607668664054071705659...[Left the rest of the 96k of text-output away].00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
Leaving GHCi.