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I believe that ultimately human consciousness can be described by a program. Now this doesn’t mean we’re all in the Matrix, simply that our mind is a giant seething logical machine with values that are manipulated by rules.

Relax to a slow flythrough of an interesting subset of the quaternion Julia fractals.

Solar flares, Chinese hobos, and undersea noises on deck for this Monday. Live in STEREO   One of the largest solar flares in recent history was captured last week by STEREO, a pair of satellites staggered along Earth’s orbit to obtain a constant clear view. The flare was about half the width of the sun, [...]

A few little things for Monday – 5000 fish and recommended reading from MIT.

This simulation of a school of fish allows you to play with the weightings of three rules that cause coordinated group behavior.

In winter during the late afternoon before settling down to roost, flocks of thousands of starlings will twist and turn, turning the sky black with strange curves that seem to move with a mind of their own. The flocks of up to a million strong form for warmth, for security, and for social contact.

In the previous post, we discussed the Prisoner’s Dilemma and saw how a simple strategy called Tit-for-Tat enforced the Golden Rule and won a very interesting contest. But does Tit-for-Tat always come out on top? The most confounding thing about the strategy is that it can never win – at best, it can only tie [...]

Almost every decision we make involves someone else in one way or another, and we face a constant choice. Should we take advantage of them, go for the quick score and hope we never see them again – or should we settle for a more reasonable reward, co-operating in the hope that this peaceful relationship will continue long into the future?

Ski lift operators have proved that it’s not only conidae snails who can produce the Sierpinski triangle in their natural environment.

A philosophy website recently conducted a very interesting survey about some of these greatest standing questions in philosophy.