Tagged: Philosophy
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What does a random place look like?
What does a random place on Earth look like? Is it pristine and beautiful like this one? …or polluted and gloomy like this one? Let’s find out. Let’s find photos of 5 random places around the world. But how? Random places The first challenge is to select 5 random places. This is not as straightfo...
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Presentation on Innovation (IceWeb 2008)
Ever since the banking crisis struck Iceland a few weeks ago, I’ve been running out and about to advocate for innovation as the way to rebuild the economy. Yesterday, I was privileged to give a presentation on the topic at the IceWeb conference. The title of my talk was “The Innovation Renaissanc...
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The future of finance: Total transparency?
The financial crisis hit Iceland full force last Monday. One of our banks was pretty much nationalized, followed by a large investment company filing the equivalent of Chapter 11. This led to significant losses by a large “risk free” money market fund, that stored a part or all of the personal sa...
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Adventures in copyright: Open access, data and wikis
I’ve just had a very interesting experience that sheds light on some important issues regarding copyright, online data and crowdsourced media such as wikis. I thought I’d share the story to spark a debate on these issues. For a couple of years I’ve worked on and off on a simple web based system f...
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Dear Apple – may we pay?
Update (Feb 7): Updated the estimated number of iPhones in Iceland in light of more reliable data. As stated before: I live in a small country, nobody wants my money. In the couple of years since I wrote that post, I’ve been watching in awe as my fellow Icelanders – and in fact a lot […]
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Visited Countries – Revisited
When I read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book “A Short History of Nearly Everything“, one of the things that stood out, was a reminder that the world is still a really big place. Even though we feel that we can – with a credit card, and a solid visa – get pretty much anywhere in the […]
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Personal Blogs are the Public Life Bits
A few months ago I wrote about “Memories for Life“, a proposal for a Grand Challenge in computer science. The aim of that Grand Challenge was to find ways to store, index and secure our digital memories, i.e. the digital trail that we’re constantly building in the form of digital photos, email co...
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Scientists Have Found That Scientists Are Often Wrong
I tend to be very skeptical about news articles where the headline reads: “Scientists have found that…”. Too often the scientist or researchers involved aren’t even named and there is no way of digging in further to see if it was indeed professional scientific work that led to the conclusion. Thi...
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Exams: We Have Changed, They Haven’t
I just had a period of exams. Don’t get me wrong, I think I did ok on most of them so this entry is not to blame “it” on something, but I started thinking about the nature of exams, what they are for and how they are performed. To my best knowledge, exams today are […]
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The Lowest Integer Number not Found on the Web
A long time ago I heard about a funny paradox. The paradox was about the lowest integer number that was not special in any way. “Special numbers” were defined by certain rules. Even numbers were special, so were prime numbers, any multiple of 5, 2 in any power and any number with two digits alike...
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More Monkey Math
The Famous Brett Watson has written a detailed and intelligent response to my entry “Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing“. In my entry I discussed that while a thousand monkeys typing randomly might not reproduce so much as a single quote from the works of Shakespeare – ever, a thousand monkeys with...
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Breeding Shakespeare, Not Typing
“A thousand monkeys, typing on a thousand typewriters will eventually type the entire works of William Shakespeare.” This quote is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s most faithful followers in the debate that followed the publication of “Origin of Species” in 1859. Other versions of the ...
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The Needs and Rights of Humans and Robots
In the Wetware post last week on “A New Way to Fight Blog Comment Spam” I proposed methods that would prevent robots from posting comments. Kalsey commented that there are clear indications that many spam comments are actually posted manually, rather than by robots, rendering my proposed function...
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Design with Nature as Role Model
This entry is adapted from a presentation I did at the University of Iceland today, hence all the decorations. Using nature as a role model in design is one of my biggest interests. By this notion I’m talking about how we can study nature and use its solutions, designs and methods when making our...
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Unified Knowledge
I had an exam in the Philosophy of Science this week, so I’m still somewhat on the philosophical note. Science has of course interested me for a long time, but I had not really taken a good look at the foundations before. This should of course be obligatory for anyone that wants to be a […]