All Along the Watchtower

OK, it looks like Ronald D. Moore was right - anyone else just a little freaked out about this after watching the BSG finale?

Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All By Itself

For the first time, a robotic system has made a novel scientific discovery with virtually no human intellectual input.

Scientists designed "Adam" to carry out the entire scientific process on its own: formulating hypotheses, designing and running experiments, analyzing data, and deciding which experiments to run next.

"It's a major advance," says David Waltz of the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University. "Science is being done here in a way that incorporates artificial intelligence. It's automating a part of the scientific process that hasn't been automated in the past."

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How long before they are designing number eights? We were going to originally title this post "All Of This Has Happened Before, And All Of It Will Happen Again", pt. 4, but that would be just confusing . . .

3月28日隨即的事情； 今天天氣非常好 － 出外玩吧！

＊ It's wicked nice outside - go out and play (see: title of this post)!

＊ Battlestar Galactica - we'll miss you. Obviously the title of this blog owes a little something to BSG, and homages are occasionally paid, so we're sad to see the show end. That's not to say that the show didn't get very, well, bad in the last season. As for the finale, it's far and away the best episode artistically of the fourth season. The 40 minute battle scene was wicked cool, and we are all tearing up in the penultimate goodbye scenes a tiny bit. I also liked the very last ending sequence, as it sent a small chill through spine. But thematically? I dunno, it left a lot of open questions and gave me the sense of a sort of a cop-out - an (all to literal) deus ex machina ending (zing!). It's pretty obvious to me that they didn't plan to get this far and a lot of the (bogus) prophecies are left both unfulfilled and unexplained. Alas, I'll say no more, because I don't want to spoil it for those who haven't scene it yet (or haven't had the good fortune of being hooked on the first half of the series).

＊ Speaking of puns, somehow this law student from Fordham got a piece in yesteday's New York Times writing about them? I mean, how do you set THAT up? We're positively jealous . . . If anyone from the NYT ed-board is reading this (doubtful), we'll write about anything: Law stuff, tv-shows, Feb Club, AIG Bonuses, OGI . . . anything!

＊ We mentioned a while back that we didn't like the time after the Libel Show, because it meant that things were starting to get real in re exams. Well, DING! - out of pure indolence we have decided that the new rule is that things get real after the Softball Invitational. And speaking of the Softball Invivational - which is next weekend - be sure to check UVA Law Blog live coverage (or maybe not so live, as there's no wireless at the Park . . . but you know what I mean).

＊ We think we heard someone on main grounds say the other day that "evolution is only a theory" in the course of an argument/debate. Hehe.

＊ EDIT: Did we mention it's *really* nice out? From 10 minutes ago: