lundi 1 mars 2010
dimanche 21 février 2010
jeudi 31 décembre 2009
Housse pour Archos 5 IT
Je cherchais une housse pour mon Archos 5 IT qui réponde aux critères suivants :
- pas chère,
- peu épaisse (si j'ai choisi la version Flash 32Go de l'Archos 5 IT, ce n'est pas pour me retrouver avec un truc qui fasse 2 ou 3 centimètres d'épaisseur au final),
- que je puisse glisser facilement dans la poche intérieur de ma veste,
- me permettant de laisser le fil de mes écouteurs branché en permanence pour écouter ma zik pendant les trajets,
- qui protège mon A5IT, écran compris (sinon, ce n'est pas une housse... :-)).
Ma femme l'a fait : un sweat trop court de mon fils, un bout de manche découpé, 2 coutures et voilà une housse pour mon Archos 5 IT bien douce (extérieur comme intérieur) et qui empêche l'A5IT de sortir tout seul grâce au bout de manche resserré.
dimanche 29 novembre 2009
Machine à remonter le temps
Pas besoin de s'appeler H. G. Wells pour avoir une machine à remonter le temps chez soi ! ... :-)
lundi 19 octobre 2009
samedi 22 août 2009
Paradoxe du barbier
Qui rase le barbier ?
samedi 18 juillet 2009
mardi 30 juin 2009
samedi 27 juin 2009
Quelques perles de Jean-Claude Van Damme
- "Si tu travailles avec un marteau-piqueur pendant un tremblement de terre, désynchronise-toi, sinon tu travailles pour rien."
- "J'adore les cacahuètes. Tu bois une bière et tu en as marre du goût. Alors tu manges des cacahuètes. Les cacahuètes, c'est doux et salé, fort et tendre, comme une femme. Manger des cacahuètes, "it's a really strong feeling". Et après tu as de nouveau envie de boire de la bière. Les cacahuètes c'est le mouvement perpétuel à la portée de l'homme."
- "Dans les magasins de lingerie, on ne voit pas de calendriers avec des photos de garage."
- "Une femme qui est enceinte, par exemple, elle est aware qu'elle attend un enfant. "
- "La vie c'est quelque chose de très fort et de très beau. La vie appartient à tous les vivants. "It's both a dream and a feeling". C'est être ce que nous ne sommes pas sans le rester. La vie c'est mourir aussi. Et mourir c'est vraiment strong, c'est rester en vie au delà de la mort. Tous ceux qui sont morts n'ignorent pas de le savoir. "
"Moi, Adam et Eve, j'y crois plus tu vois, parce que je suis pas un idiot : la pomme, ça peut pas être mauvais, c'est plein de pectine."
- "Un biscuit ça n'a pas de spirit. C'est juste un biscuit. Mais, avant c'était du lait, des œufs. Et dans les œufs, il y a la vie potentielle. "
- "Je suis fasciné par l'air. Si on enlevait l'air du ciel, tous les oiseaux tomberaient par terre. Et les avions aussi. En même temps l'air tu peux pas le toucher...ça existe et ça existe pas. Ca nourrit l'homme sans qu'il ait faim. "It's magic". L'air c'est beau en même temps tu peux pas le voir, c'est doux et tu peux pas le toucher... L'air c'est un peu comme mon cerveau. "
vendredi 19 juin 2009
Delirium - Etymology
lundi 25 août 2008
dimanche 11 novembre 2007
mardi 23 octobre 2007
dimanche 30 septembre 2007
dimanche 19 août 2007
Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.
This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.
You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.
“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”
Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”
My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.
It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.
A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.
David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.
You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.
Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).
Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?
If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.
It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.
If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.
It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”
