Missing Mary Road

After 15 years of retreat, a huge sheet of ice is finally crumbling in Antarctica. The Wilkins is the eighth and largest ice shelf to fracture and fall apart in the last two decades along the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula.

The pattern of breakup, where the ice remains stable for centuries or even millennia, then almost over night, shatters into millions of bits like broken glass, is foreshadowing the fate of our northern ice floating in the Arctic.

flash game of the day…effin’ hail. let’s see how far you get. i’m still beating the weather balloons.

japanese have weird brain games. here’s a few of them. this one intrigued me.

seems like my brain age is 35 years.

might be a bit confusing initially. wait for the 3, 2, 1 countdown then click on the circles numerically from lowest to highest. tell me how you did.

Scientists are claiming that it’s very possible that the internet could become self-aware and know exactly what you’re looking at.

The claim comes courtesy of New Scientist, as part of their “Unknown Internet” series of articles. Worryingly enough, they quote chairman of the Artificial General Intelligence Research InstituteBen Goertzel as suggesting that a self-aware internet may already be here:

The internet behaves a fair bit like a mind [already, it] might already have a degree of consciousness… The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.

Others, such as Francis Heylighen, research professor at the Free University of Brussels, don’t share such optimism, but do think that we’re not that far off from a conscious web, no matter how disappointing that may be:

Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level [but we] probably would not notice a whole lot of a difference, initially.