LSE Working Papers

http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/economicHistory/pdf/FACTSPDF/HowWellDoFactsTravelWP.htm

What Happens If You Say Meme

“Memes” are the units of selection in culture as genes are the units of selection in evolution. When we talk of traits (height, hairiness, colour-blindness, and so on) being passed down through generations, we are also talking about genes being passed down. Likewise, when we talk of ideas being passed from person to person, we are also talking about memes. Richard Dawkins introduced the idea of memes towards the end of The Selfish Gene, where they were a means of demonstrating the wider applicability of the Darwinian algorithm of descent with modification. Memes seem to offer a new vocabulary for discussing travelling facts. They seem to be precisely the type of things that might enable us to gain insight into the transmission and reception of facts across time and between disciplines. Added to which, they are apparently a scientific way to talk about this.

What Happens If You Say Meme

The Nano Song

Quite possibly the most entertaining informative video I've ever seen!

See it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFoC-uxRqCg

The Future of Computer Hacking

The future of computer hacking lies not in reviving the underground culture that digested itself once it decided it needed to support a wife or husband and 2.3 kids (and is now what is colloquially known as the 'computer security industry'), but in an altogether new paradigm in the field of computing. There is much new technology on the horizon that makes contemporary computer hacking seem lame, boring, and, well... just plain old-fashioned. Computer hacking - in the traditional sense - went out with the 90's; now we have things like transhumanism, singularity, virtual reality, feasible DIY genetic engineering, etc. to keep us busy.

The Future of Machine Intelligence

In early March 2009, 100 intellectual adventurers journeyed from various corners of Europe, Asia, America and Australasia to the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Arlington Virginia, to take part in the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI-09: a conference aimed explicitly at the grand goal of the AI field, the creation of thinking machines with general intelligence at the human level and ultimately beyond.

The Future of Machine Intelligence

Scotch Tape Makes X-Rays

"In 1939 Princeton University scientist E. Newton Harvey wrote in the journal Science that “most experimenters have observed the transient greenish luminescence which occurs at the point where electricians or surgeons’ or ‘Scotch’ tape is stripped from a roll.” In other words, peeling tape produces light. In an airless chamber, a vacuum, the phenomenon becomes much more energetic, releasing high-energy X-rays in addition to visible light — according to a 1953 report from researchers in the then Soviet Union."

Scotch tape makes X-rays