Izhaki, I and co-workers have demonstrated that honey bees like nectar with nicotine and caffeine. Nice to know not just humans use cognitive enhancers. Wild animals sometimes use intoxicants (besides using the drugs as nutrients) or even self-medicate, although I... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Gary Kasparov has an interesting essay on the effects of widespread beyond-grandmaster chess software on the chess community. Here is a quote that caught my eye: It was my luck (perhaps my bad luck) to be the world chess champion... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

How resilient is a society to disruptions? Here is one simple model with some interesting dynamics. The society is modelled as a network of nodes, where each node gets inputs (information, energy, money, goods etc.) from other nodes. It needs... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Here is a lovely little paper titled [0912.3967] Road planning with slime mould: If Physarum built motorways it would route M6/M74 through Newcastle. The authors use slime moulds to find optimal road networks: We consider the ten most populated urban... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

[0912.5480] The Black Hole Case: The Injunction Against the End of the World by Eric E. Johnson is a paper on the legal problems of handling existential risk and radical uncertainty. I like it because it cites our paper -... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

The UK Home Office clearly lacks any knowledge of history: why to use ID cards (flash). Wow... this is a monumental self-goal. This is exactly why anonymity is sometimes important. I don't mind having an ID number and ID card... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Dodecahedral sex Rule 35 states that "If there is no porn of it, it will be created". During a discussion about this (where a far too innocent friend lost several bets on the non-existence of various erotic subjects) I realized... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Irregular Webcomic! #2518 brings up the "my own grampa" paradox - if you go back in the past and have a child, you can become your own grandparent. There is an interesting genetic issue here. Around one fourth of your... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

In my last climate data posting I had managed to load the data into Matlab and plot some of it. Now I have extended the scripts to organize the data in time and space so that I can actually check... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Two lectures from here: Future of Humanity Institute - Global Catastrophic Risks with Nick Bostrom and Human Enhancement: Bioliberation or Biothreat? with Julian Savulescu. The interesting thing is the flash-based lecture player, which has a few cool features. Besides showing... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

The Met office has now released a lot of climate data, setting off a frenzy of amateur visualisation and analysis. I could of course not stay away, so here are my first results. Plotting the locations of weather stations in... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

This is why life extension is not just a moral thing to do, but also macroeconomically sensible: Long-term economic growth stimulus of human capital preservation in the elderly - a new paper in PNAS. While they are most interested in... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Foreign Policy has made a list of the top 100 global thinkers. I'm happy to say that Nick Bostrom is #73 on that list, just over Gordon Brown (and just below Ray Kurzweil and Jamais Cascio). The amusing thing (beside... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

The Brain Observatory - In Memory of H.M. webcasts the microtome slicing of H.M.'s brain in realtime. I guess this is a natural step for one of the "superstar patients" of neuroscience. The experience is strangely voyeuristic. We have come... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Practical Ethics: Diluted evidence: is there anything special with homeopathy? - I blog about the committee meeting on the evidence for homoeopathy I attended last week in Westminster. Hurray for Ben Goldacre and Evan Harris. It was an interestingly mixed... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Here is an audio interview courtesy of Marjan Grilj (Slovenian transhumanist association) that I gave in Milan on brain emulation and whole bunch of other subjects. Currently a bit too busy with running around in Westminster as part of the... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Accelerating Future » Toby Ord on BBC for Giving What We Can - a post on my saintly colleague Toby's very worthy project Giving What We Can. Michael writes: "Toby is participating in what I glibly call “utility war” —... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

Sergei Maslov writes a viewpoint Power laws in chess about the paper Zipf’s Law in the Popularity Distribution of Chess Openings (Bernd Blasius and Ralf Tönjes, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 218701 (2009)). Blasius and Tönjes have observed that chess opening... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

I gave some input to a report written by the Future Laboratory for Oracle about "Capitalizing on the digital age". Not very futuristic by my standards, but still full of interesting small ideas that make sense of things. For example,... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se

My soil is filled with organisms named in Greek and Latin. My blood contains chemicals invented in America. I feel moved when I see the statue of Hierta, but only smile when I see the parade of kings. I feel... Anders3 http://www.aleph.se/ asa@nada.kth.se Personal