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Misunderstandings
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1–2 minutes·
No comments on MisunderstandingsYet again, people are being confused by Kevin ‘Captain Cyborg’ Warwick’s work. Wired has just published an article about Tech Predictions for the Decade, and here’s a quote: Other futuristic technology poised for human consumption is the implanted sensor. Gantz pointed out that University of Reading professor Kevin Warwick, who has a sensor implanted in…
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Nine degrees of separation
Steppe by step – a nice article about a journalist testing out Milgram’s theory that any two people in the world are only separated by a chain of six acquaintances. The journalist decided to see how many people it would take for her to meet a Mongolian herdsman.
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Pattern Recognition
A major part of my project involves me taking recordings of a signal (in this case, electrochemical spikes from a neuron) and discriminating them from the noise inherent in the system…
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Digital TV
An interesting quotation from this week’s New Scientist confirms what I’ve suspected* for a while: The latest 42 inch widescreen flat plasma panel screens cost around $7000, not counting a $250 wall mount and the digital tuner needed to receive broadcasts. Yet customers appear unconvinced of their quality. It turns out you cannot see the…
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Mars beckons
It’s now just over a week until I go to Mars – or more accurately, to the Mars Society’s Mars Desert Research Station. Things are looking up – the Station took delivery of three new Kawasaki ATVs recently, and when I get there, the hab will have been in use for a month, meaning that…
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Fun New Words
New words and terms I’ve heard at my lab: Fiascotorial, adj.: combinations or permutations of fiasco-like situations. e.g., “And then the squirrel fell into the bowl! Just imagine the fiascotorial possibilites!” Gene-jockey, n.: derogatory term for a geneticist or molecular biology. e.g., “Those gene-jockeys working on the squirrel genome project, they don’t understand that the…
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Reprise
Saw Donnie Darko a second time today, with a friend from Leeds; it survived rewatching quite well. Afterwards, I described my ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ theory of cognitive development to her. It’s a little like Piaget’s controversial theory (although obviously much sillier). Jean Piaget was a psychologist who believed that children when through qualitatively different levels…
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Army of Penguins
Such is the power of Google; I go to a lecture by Steve Jones tonight, and five minutes after I get back I can find the exact same image of a bull elephant seal surrounded by its army of penguins used by Steve.
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Robert Mundell’s Top Ten Benefits From Winning the Nobel Prize
Robert Mundell’s Top Ten Benefits From Winning the Nobel Prize – starts with ‘Can end almost any argument by asking, “And did you ever win a Nobel Prize?”‘
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Spiritng Neal Stephenson Away
A review of a lecture by award-winning SF author Neal Stephenson, on ‘Newton/Leibniz’, together with a review of Miyazaki’s film ‘Spirited Away’.
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