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Recursive
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2–3 minutes·
No comments on RecursiveDuring dinner yesterday, I mentioned to Andrew Paul and The Official Bear Of The Third Millennium that I’d recently had an MRI scan done of my brain. Someone then said how strange it must be to see the activity of your brain in real time. I was just in the middle of replying that the…
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Here in my car
There was a lot of driving today to go and see the Penguin Parade at Phillips Island, about two hours south of Melbourne. This will hopefully explain all of the exposition on driving that I’ll make later. On the way to the Penguin Parade, we stopped off at a little wildlife sanctuary to see some…
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A China Moon
Some people believe that China is really serious about human spaceflight. Really serious, as in, intends to establish a permanent human present on the Moon in the near future. At least one Japanese politician thinks it could happen within four years. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter exactly when it happens; if China decides…
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The Dream
E-Ink announced their prototype electronic book display last week. Finally, the dream of a portable, long-lasting electronic book reader may finally be upon us. The contrast and resolution of the display (160dpi) look quite acceptable and I’m not really bothered about the fact that it has no colour; neither do any of my paperbacks. As…
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Making the extraordinary seem ordinary
A couple of days ago over dinner, I was having one of those typical university conversations about whether the Internet had really changed the world. As was pointed out, “We’re still not buying all of our groceries over the web.” I replied with something about delivery of large perishable goods and how in fact the…
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SARS as a weapon
There is some talk on the Internet about SARS being a Russian or Chinese biological weapon. I am not particularly convinced, and I certainly don’t think it’s a helpful suggestion given that there’s plenty of worry going on at the moment. Of course it could be a biological weapon; there are plenty of research labs…
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Speed
Yesterday I had an interesting debate about whether science is suffering from diminishing returns these days; i.e. that it costs more than it used to to get answers. On the face of it, this seems true; we spend billions on particle accelerators, space telescopes and medical research programmes. We never spent that amount of money…
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Multiverse
Just been to a very interesting talk by Prof. Hugh Mellor on the subject of the Multiverse. The idea* behind the Multiverse is that there are uncountable numbers of other universes out there that have slightly different properties to ours, owing to different initial conditions. We can never see any of the other universes in…
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Trailers as a cultural indicator
While watching my Back to the Future DVD for the umpteenth time, I decided to go and check out the original theatrical trailer. Since the film first opened in 1985, the trailer was suitably cringeworthy, what with all the flashing LEDs, arrays of ‘futuristic’ buttons, shots of the Delorean’s profile and the silly dialogue: V/O:…
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The Drugs Don’t Work
Over the past two days I’ve had an excellent two-part workshop in my neuroscience course on addiction, covering what we know about the causes of drug addiction at a molecular, cellular and cognitive level, reward pathways in the brain and possible treatments, vaccines and cures for drug addiction. Definitely one of the most thought provoking…
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