About
Reverse Zone, weblog on urban planning, sustainability, and technology.
Martin Laplante
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A few favourite links.
- Planetizen
- Cyburbia
- LookWAYup dictionary
- RES Policy Research Inc.
- Medical Reference
- AI Topics
- Pattern Language
- Scale Down, Windsor
- Raise the Hammer
- Price Tags
- Urban Squares
- NYC Streets
- Grush Hour
- Save Griffintown
- DNS Help
Friends' Blogs - David Wilson
- Viktor Toth
- Michael Geist
Recent posts
- The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown
- Internet Identity Keystone Kops
- LA Transit Plan Aims to Save 725 Metric Tons of GHG Annually by 2030
- New York City's Congestion Pricing Plan Dies Yet Again
- New York Discovers Existing Direct Democracy Zoning Rule
- Driving is Going Down in the US
- The Commuting Turnaround in Canada
- Vancouver Churches Get a Licence to Break the Law
- Carbon Capture and Storage For Canada
- Prince of Wales Promotes Health, Wealth, and Courtesy
- Physical Measures Reduce Trips by How Much?
- Tall Buildings Incompatible with New Urbanism
- Direct Voter Control of Comprehensive Plans Fails
- TOD Mindset Moving Away From Pedestrian-friendly Focus
- Land Use Responsible for Biofuel Carbon Debt
- Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story
- How do the New Fuel Efficiency Standards Compare with California and Europe?
- Why We Still Need Separation of Uses
- Wikia Search Launches, Minus the Unique Features
- Malls as Make-believe Town Centres Minus the Wrong Kind of People
- NASA's scrambled data: it's not rocket science
- What Did John Baird Know and When Did He Know It?
- Is the Pope For or Against Urgent Climate Change Action?
- Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize
- Carbon Offsets in Ontario
- Is Carbon Sequestration Completely Useless?
- Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal
- Congestion Pricing, Privacy, and Mesh Wireless Networking
- Cycling Will Kill You, But Not Cycling Will Kill You More
- Sprawl as Linear Population Density
2008/03
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2007/12
2007
2006
2005
Complete List of Posts
Here is a neat model of a Turing Machine made of Lego that I noticed earlier this summer. Of course to be a real Turing machine it would need an infinite number of pieces of Lego for its stack
I have come across plenty of computer science graduates who don't know what a Turing machine is. I guess to them computer science is just a religion, based on faith. What is the point of cryptography without knowing what is computable and what is not?
Of course, artificial intelligence has wasted a lot of effort trying to figure out what may or may not be computable. This time it is a more legitimately religious issue. After all our soul is at stake. Well, if you think that your soul requires a proof of the impossibility of programming a computer to be as human as a human. Maybe what we need is to build some automata that are clever enough to make every possible argument for and against it, and move on with useful AI work. And if a computer is eventually clever enough to use a legal loophole to trick St Peter (or Satan) into letting it in, it will at least have an interesting story to tell during eternity.