THIS JUST IN: NASA: Photos taken years appart show mud transitions that are believed to have been caused by running water.

The photographs by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft, which fell silent last month after almost 10 years of observing the planet from orbit, show what appear to be light-colored deposits in two gullies on crater walls. They were not present in earlier photographs.

…

The shapes of these deposits are what you would expect to see if the material were carried by flowing water,” Mr. Malin said during a televised news conference held here at NASA headquarters. The deposits appeared to have been left by a liquid mixed with dirt or other material that flowed down a slope for hundreds of yards, he said.

This is incredible! Both in the sense that this increases the chances of alien bacteria surviving on Mars — and that with water there, terraforming would be a lot simpler task.

you can read theNYTimes article here!

I just read a quite entertaining and good article — or series of questions. The Independant published questions written by “You” for Richard Dawkins.

Now, I don’t believe in god — but I’ve been uncertain about Dawkins’ methods for some time, even after I saw him in person lecture at an international atheist conference here in Reykjavik. I think he’s a lot better writer than speaker — the answers he provides here made a much deeper impression on me than his lectures.

Read the article here.

Also, this blogger has a nice entry on atheism. She discusses having heard a podcast show called “The New Atheists”, referring to the recent pro-active responses of atheists to “a growing influence of religion in public life”. A good blog entry, but I’m not sure religion’s influence is growing (I hope not), but gaining attention. Mostly because of the recent rediculous attacks on science.

Since I first heard it, I’ve always loved the word savvy — although I admit that for quite some time, I had no idea how to use it in a sentence.

I guess this will be the only word I ever partition a whole blog entry for, so I better do it properly. The origin of the word, according to Dictionary.com, is ca. 1775-85 and derives from the spanish word Sabe, 3rd singular of Saber: to know (from Latin sapere, to be wise).

• Savvy can be used as a noun, meaning practical intelligence/knowledge or common sense — or the cognitive condition of understanding. A programmer known for Java savvy.
• As a verb: getting the meaning of something, understanding — savvy?.
• And as a adjective (savvy, savvier, savviest), meaning well informed and perceptive — “savvy blogger”.

To put it all together: Now you are savvier on the uses of the word savvy, and have earned the right to say loudly, and proudly:

I’m very reluctant and almost ashamed to even link to this article in the The Register, it doesn’t deserve your attention, but I’ll write about because of the relationship with my main field of research (Creativity / A.I.) — and because it’s a prime example of pseudoscience in action.

This guy is apparently answering a recent interview with Stephen Hawking. In this interview, Hawking suggests that we must advance brain-computer interface technologies (connecting our brains directly to computers) so that artificial brains of the future contribute to the human intelligence rather than oppose it (interesting to hear that Hawking is thinking along these lines). The author of the rebuke, Thomas Greene, in a borderline barbaric manner, blatantly claims that Hawking is an idiot and that human-level A.I. will never be possible.

Now, I’ve had a saying for many years, which is: If you believe in the Theory of Evolution, you believe that the brain is a machine. Machines can be replicated, hence you believe that human intelligence can be replicated in machines.

Mr. Greene believes in evolution. However — he introduces an interesting (or not) twist: He believes that humans encompass a certain quality that machines can’t acquire. He calls it “irrational insight” — which we (humans) “mainly exhibit in religion, art and literature”. What he’s referring to is creativity, more or less — and that computers are too logical to replicate this feature. His actual point is irrelevant and I’m not going to waste my time answering his pseudoscientific arguments (which he has more than a handful).

This dude exhibits and combines three commonplace intellectual fallacies, the trademarks of pseudoscience:

• He assumes we know enough to know what we don’t know. i.e. that human level intelligence can only be brought about by natural evolution, and not by any other process.
• He takes a concept that we don’t fully understand yet (e.g. insight, creativity, emotions) and announces that it’s impossible to replicate. Even though he doesn’t really know how it works or what made it come about.
• He draws concrete assumptions about scientific unknowns in our world, venturing instantly into religious territories.

There’s also a fourth, more annoying than interesting fallacy: most of the concepts he mentions are very ambiguous and ill-defined, communally obfuscating the pseudoscientific nature of his arguments. This makes the whole article very hard to counter-argue in a sensible manner, and regrettably will cause some poor souls to actually buy into it.

My last words are simply: Beware pseudoscience.