Biomedia – Page 5 – Gravity Drift

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Turing machine – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Turing machine is a device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table of rules. Despite its simplicity, a Turing machine can be adapted to simulate the logic of any computer algorithm, and is particularly useful in explaining the functions of a CPU inside a computer.

The “Turing” machine was described by Alan Turing in 1936,^[1] who called it an “a(utomatic)-machine”. The Turing machine is not intended as a practical computing technology, but rather as a hypothetical device representing a computing machine. Turing machines help computer scientists understand the limits of mechanical computation.

Turing gave a succinct definition of the experiment in his 1948 essay, “Intelligent Machinery”. Referring to his 1936 publication, Turing wrote that the Turing machine, here called a Logical Computing Machine, consisted of:

…an unlimited memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares, on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behaviour of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings.^[2] (Turing 1948, p. 61)

A Turing machine that is able to simulate any other Turing machine is called a universal Turing machine (UTM, or simply a universal machine). A more mathematically oriented definition with a similar “universal” nature was introduced by Alonzo Church, whose work on lambda calculus intertwined with Turing’s in a formal theory ofcomputation known as the Church–Turing thesis. The thesis states that Turing machines indeed capture the informal notion of effective method in logic and mathematics, and provide a precise definition of an algorithm or ‘mechanical procedure’.

Dianetics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dianetics is a set of pseudoscientific ideas and practices regarding the metaphysical relationship between the mind and body that was invented by L. Ron Hubbard and is practiced by followers of Scientology. Hubbard coined Dianetics from the Greek stems dia, meaning through, and nous, meaning mind.

Dianetics explores the existence of a mind with three parts: the conscious “analytical mind,” the subconscious “reactive mind“, and the somatic mind.^[1] The goal of Dianetics is to remove the “reactive mind”, which Scientologists believe prevents people from becoming more ethical, more aware, happier and saner. The Dianetics procedure to achieve this is called “auditing”.^[2] Auditing is a process whereby a series of questions are asked by the Scientology auditor, in an attempt to rid the auditee of the painful experiences of the past which scientologists believe to be the cause of the “reactive mind”.

Dianetics grew out of Hubbard’s personal experiences and experiments and has been described as a mix of “Western technology and Oriental philosophy”.^[3] Hubbard stated that Dianetics “forms a bridge between” cybernetics and General Semantics, a set of ideas about education originated by Alfred Korzybski that was receiving much attention in the science fiction world in the 1940s

Dianetics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Polis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Derivatives of polis are common in many modern European languages. This is indicative of the influence of the polis-centred Hellenic world view. Derivative words in English include policy, polity, police and politics. In Greek, words deriving from polis include politēs and politismos, whose exact equivalents in Latin, Romance and other European languages, respectively civis (citizen), civilisatio (civilization) etc. are similarly derived.

A number of words end in the word “-polis”. Most refer to a special kind of city and/or state. Some examples are:

Astropolis — star-scaled city/industry area; complex space station; a European star-related festival.
Cosmopolis — a large urban centre with a population of many different cultural backgrounds; a novel written by Don DeLillo.
Ecumenopolis — a city that covers an entire planet, usually seen in science fiction
Megalopolis, built by merging several cities and their suburbs.
Metropolis can refer to the mother city of a colony, the see of a metropolitan archbishop or a Metropolitan area — a major urban population centre.
Necropolis ‘city of the dead’ — a graveyard.
Technopolis — city with high-tech industry; room full of computers; the Internet.

Other refer to part of a city or a group of cities, such as:

Acropolis, ‘high city’ — upper part of a polis, often citadel and/or site of major temple(s).
Decapolis, a group of ten cities
Dodecapolis, a group of twelve cities
Pentapolis, a group of five cities
Tripolis, a group of three cities, retained in the names of a Tripoli in Libya, in Greece and a namesake in Lebanon

via Polis – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Biorobotics – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Biorobotics is a term that loosely covers the fields of cybernetics, bionics and even genetic engineering as a collective study.

Biorobotics is often used to refer to a real subfield of robotics: studying how to make robots that emulate or simulate living biological organisms mechanically or even chemically. The term is also used in a reverse definition: making biological organisms as manipulatable and functional as robots, or making biological organisms as components of robots.

In the latter sense biorobotics can be referred to as a theoretical discipline of comprehensive genetic engineering in which organisms are created and designed by artificial means. The creation of life from non-living matter for example, would be biorobotics. The field is in its infancy and is sometimes known as synthetic biology or bionanotechnology.

In fiction, the robots featured in Rossum’s Universal Robots, the play that originally coined the term, are presented as artificial biological entities closer to biorobotics than the mechanical objects that the term came to refer to. The replicants in the film Blade Runner would be considered biorobotic in nature: (synthetic) organisms of living tissue and cells yet created artificially. Instead of microchips, their brain is based on ganglions/artificial neurons.

No Robots by YungHan Chang

Hats off to YungHan Chang and Kimberly Knoll for directing this poetic short animation — titled No Robots — as a student project at San Jose State University. In this vignette, an anti-robot shopkeeper must deal with an unexpected clanking visitor.

via http://vimeo.com/23017365

Endosymbiotic theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The endosymbiotic theory concerns the mitochondria, plastids (e.g. chloroplasts), and possibly other organelles of eukaryotic cells.

According to this theory, certain organelles originated as free-living bacteria that were taken inside another cell as endosymbionts. Mitochondria developed from proteobacteria (in particular, Rickettsiales, the SAR11 clade,^[1]^[2] or close relatives) and chloroplasts from cyanobacteria.

via Endosymbiotic theory – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Philosophy of Memory – Nerves, sound and ecphory

I am deeply fascinated by the notion that nerves operate using sound not electricity.

There is a theory in psychology of memory retrieval called ecphory based on an analogy with sound. Wouldn’t it be something if sound was not an analogy or a metaphor, but the actual vehicle of communication?

via Philosophy of Memory – Nerves, sound and ecphory.