Göbekli Tepe

National Geographic introduced Göbekli Tepe in 2011. Most of us probably missed that one. Recently, more articles are coming out about this site in South East Turkey (just a few miles north of Syria). According to National Geographic, the site is to be restored.

What makes this site important? It happens to be the oldest known monument in the history of humanity. How old, you ask? The "elaborately carved stones and distinctive, T-shaped pillars are more than 12,000 years old"

Let's repeat that again; "older than 12 thousand years." That is way older than pyramids; even 6,000 years older than Stonehenge. The pillars in the monument are carved out of stone during a time when humans did not have any tools, or so we thought...

Göbekli Tepe is actually forcing archeologists to make 'adjustments' to what we have known about human civilization's evolution.

Related: Wikipedia on Göbekli Tepe

New robot from Alphabet company

A Japanese branch of Alphabet introduced a new robot. Here is a video:

For comparison, here is a video of the robot created by another branch that Alphabet is trying to divest. 

I understand that Boston Dynamics has military connections (to say the least), but... But...

 Can somebody push the Schaft robot with a stick please?

And, there were (or are, or will be) aliens..

Phys.org recently published an article that asks if 'we are alone' in the universe. It describes a recent astrobiology manuscript by Adam Frank of University of Rochester and 'Woody' Sullivan of University of Washington.

Here is a link to arxiv copy.

It is a slightly different take on Drake's Equation. Using the recent discovery of multiple exoplanets as a starting point, they try to find an answer to the question: "Do/did/will any other advanced technological civilizations exists/ed?"

From the abstract... "We address the cosmic frequency of technological species. Recent advances in exoplanet studies provide strong constraints on all astrophysical terms in the Drake equation. Using these and modifying the form and intent of the Drake equation, we set a firm lower bound on the probability that one or more technological species have evolved anywhere and at any time in the history of the observable Universe."

Their calculations lead to the following: "We find that as long as the probability that a habitable zone planet develops a technological species is larger than ∼10⁻²⁴, humanity is not the only time technological intelligence has evolved. This constraint has important scientific and philosophical consequences."

'Anywhere and at any time' relaxation aside, it looks like there is/was/will be more than one civilization in the known universe if the probability of technological species on a goldilocks planet is greater than 0.000000000000000000000001. Note that earth had at least one that did not reach technological level (dinosaurs) and just one that did (although sustainability is in question :).

Related: Fox News chat with Dr Frank.

Laniakea Supercluster

In case you weren't aware (like me) of the recent change in the map of our local universe...

Laniakea supercluster containsour galaxy the Milky Way, and 100,000 other nearby galaxies. Let's read that last number again: one hundred thousand (galaxies).

It looks like this:

Here is the link to the article from 2014 that introduced the idea:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7516/full/nature13674.html

And, here is an image of other nearby superclusters:

Tay

Let's just say that second half of March 2016 was an interesting month for artificial intelligence unleashed on the internets.  Microsoft's Tay was turned on, then under 24 hours, off, due to... bad teaching?

Apparently, it/she was turned on by mistake a few days later and picked up where she left off briefly :)

Too many articles to list.

Looking forward to next version.

Bitcoin dashboard

Recently discovered 'Coin Dance' web site. It lists bitcoin nodes, block info, market cap, etc.
(I did not realized that Ethereum was at $1B market cap). Nice dashboards to read...

Don't forget to hover over the link at the bottom of their page and send them a few bucks, err, microcoins.

DL4J vs. Torch vs. Theano vs. Caffe vs. TensorFlow

May not be unbiased, but still a decent list with a great deal of useful links.

'DL4J vs. Torch vs. Theano vs. Caffe vs. TensorFlow' from deeplearning4j.org.