Movie Review

This week's movie review is posted here.

Don't let the door ...

Astronomers have discovered a couple of stars being flung entirely out of the Milky Way galaxy. Apparently the only way for a star to build up the necessary velocity to escape is two start as a one-half of a binary star system plunging toward the massive back hole at the center of the galaxy. If the trajectory is just right, one star of the system will be captured by the black hole, and the other star will be left with the orbital energy of the original two-star system. In other words, it will lose one stars worth of mass and receive a velocity boost. In this case, the velocity exceeds the escape velocity of the Milky Way(about 220 km/s) and the star speeds off into intergalactic space, never to return. I hope it doesn't get lonely out there.

13 things that do not make sense

Wait a minute! There are a lot more than 13 things that don't make any freakin' sense! I know that, but New Scientist compiled their list of stuff we just can't figure out. The article is about a year old, but it's really good. On a side note, New Scientist is much better than Scientific American, and I think Salma would agree with that.

Gratuitous Salma Shot

Why is this blog called The Chinese Room?

It's not because I'm Chinese. The Chinese Room refers to a thought experiment developed by John Searle as an argument against artificial intelligence. A good summary can be found here on Wikipedia. It seems to me that the basic argument, that a computer program could duplicate intelligence without having any real consiousness or understanding behind it, can be applied to human intelligence as well. I find the whole subject interesting and thought it would make a nice blog name.