Sądzę, że przeciw używaniu środków farmakologicznych w celach usprawnienia umysłu zażarcie protestują tylko indywidua tak głupie, że nawet najlepsza farmakologia nie może im nic pomóc.
- Jerzy Vetulan

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My TODO list

1. Reading books
2. Watching online lectures
3. Playing chess
4. Gym
5. Drawing

Stanisław Lem - Google Doodle

Hurray! Google is celebrating the 60th anniversary of my favourite author's first book! And Stanisław Lem gets the most sophisticated Google Doodle so far (see DailyMail article).

The animation of this doodle shows Trurl - a genius robotic engineer and some of the (shortened) adventures he encounters while marching through the high-tech pseudo-Medieval landscape. Most of them revolve around robots, machines and technology. The grand finale is inspired by the story of the almighty machine that is able to produce everything as long as it's starts with a letter 'n'. So we see Trulr wishing for a needle followed by a bowl of noodles. Then his dear friend Klapaucius, a brilliant robomechanic himself, tells the machine to produce nothing, which ends up as you would imagine.

I was lucky to read Bajki Robotów (~Tales of the Robots), which includes part of The Cyberiad cycle, this summer holidays on a train back home from Germany. And it was a nice touch from Google to remind me about it today.

I would really recommend reading Lem's books to anyone that is even slightly interested in artificial intelligence and the philosophy that follows.

Still, lets not forget:

Dopóki nie skorzystałem z Internetu, nie wiedziałem, że na świecie jest tylu idiotów.

(I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet).

Stanisław Lem

Use in case of procrastination.

What is Science?

People sometimes say something like ‘Oh. He’s really into doing science’ or ‘Stand back. I’m going to try science’. It may indicate that science is a kind of activity people do (which by the way may not be entirely safe). Some others might say ‘Science is developing and growing really quickly nowadays’ which suggests it might be some sort of a living entity on its own. Some may argue ‘Our lives would be so miserable if we didn’t have science’ which perhaps means that it is some type of object we all have, carrying it around in our back pockets.

The truth is a bit different though. Science is about an idea. It is about human knowledge; and a way to get to that knowledge. It is about experiments, about discoveries and about inventions. It is about finding universal truths. It is about the understanding as well as the explanations. Science may be called a belief system, a one that we have built by rigorously questioning and validating our upcoming hypotheses. It is about arguments and objections, however most of all it is about a prove. Contrary to religion or any other spiritual belief system, it is based on observable phenomenons instead of primitive superstitions. Science is there to enlarge the range of our knowledge - moving to the known limits and going beyond, pushing forward until the boarder breaks. Those breaks are how the progress in science is measured. As long as we find something original and useful the science is progressing.

Is there any definite limit to where our knowledge can get? Quite possibly. After all, we are only humans and there are (and will be) certain things we would not be able to explain. Our senses are imperfect, vision and hearing limited. We work on the same level of abstraction that our bodies operate. We don’t know how electrons really look like, neither we can smell distant stars nor touch the edge of the observable universe. Still, we can explain why such and such nucleotides bind together, we can calculate the mass of a distant pulsar or even tell the elemental composition of the universe a second after it was born. Of course some progress can be achieved without science at all - every species evolves and changes, they progress based on the sheer randomness of their mutations. However, we are not considering bacteria the pioneers of science. Science is far more than that.

For me science is about Discovery Channel. It is about a 7-year-old solving a jigsaw puzzle. It is about comparing limbs of a male figure in respect to a golden ratio. It is about thinking of a semi dead cat in a box. It is about doodling a prime spiral during a particularly boring meeting. It is about literally sacrificing your life for the studies of ionizing radioactivity. It is about stopping the sun and moving the Earth. It is about a metaphoric, perfect black monolith gliding through the outer space to the music of Strauss. It is about finding something that nobody has found before.

It is about looking into the unknown.

How to explain Monty Hall Problem better than I did

... and in just 3 minutes. All videos come from Introduction to Artificial Intelligence course at Stanford University. Hope you enjoy.



And here goes the bonus: