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IANAA, but I have a few comments neverthe less :)

First of all, visible light just isn't the best spectrum to do astronomy in for a lot of things, especially not the detection of extrasolar planets. Infrared radiation, unhindered by most space dust, and lower in energy, is clearly superior for studying things that are not giant balls of gas. The Next Generation Space Telescope and the Terrestrial Planet Finder both use infrared radiation to study objects of great interest that are difficult to study with something like the HST.

Interferometry, the technology you refer to that allows telescopes to combine their phase information to generate an image with angular resolution of that of a single larger telescope (through something known as apature synthesis) is only one of the many uses of intereferometry. Perhaps much more exciting than that is the ability of the Terrestrial Planet Finder to use nulling interferometry to selectively block out the radiation from a star, without blocking out the much fainter (millions of times less) glow of a circling planet.

Unfortunately the earth's atmosphere is mostly opaque to infra-red light, and room temperature objects (like most of the surface of the earth, and the telescopes on it) generate so much infra-red radiation that it makes it nearly impossible to do any far-infrared studies from the ground. The Darwin Project web site has a good explaination about the reasons terrestrial planet hunting should be done in space.

Ground based observatories will always have a place, however eventually it will be a matter of cost and convenience rather than any technical superiority.

Not saying this isn't cool, but it's mostly postponing the inevitable day when very little new astronomy can be done inside the confines of an atmosphere....

The deSitter Universe is just a model of the universe with zero curvature--one in which there is *exactly* enough energy to keep the matter therein expanding forever (i.e., zero curvature).

I have never heard of a space-time model for a matterless space-time. I couldn't find it under deSitter. I would be very interested to read such, if you can provide a cite.

I agree that the expansion of the universe is not caused by some currently acting force, I believe you may have misunderstood my post on that point. But your statement seems to indicate you do not seek any initial cause for the state of the expansion--that it started expanding for no reason. Even a newtonian particle at constant velocity (to use your example) needs to somehow obtain that velocity. In the case of the matter in our universe, I always thought it was because of the initial energy density and radiative pressure from the big bang, giving an initial impetus to matter. Indeed, other authors seem to think this too, see here for example (just somethign I turned up on a quick search).

Finally, something that may have caused some confusion, I mentioned recent supernova observations and the idea that there *is* a force causing *acceleration* of expansion. What I posted is accurate, do a google search for quintessence or dark energy.

The role of Linux in the history of computer science will turn out to be that Linux kept the Open Source model _open_ on the inevitable pathway to Technological Singularity.

Take for example the latest hot Linux gadget, the Sharp SL-5000D Zaurus PDA for Developers which runs both Linux and Java, and is therefore an appealing platform for the further development of Mind.JAVA Artificial Intelligence in the Linux environment -- everyman's last great hope of avoiding a catastrophic Microsoft take-over of the 'Net.

The world owes a lot to Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Eric S. Raymond, Tim Berners-Lee and the countless other heroes of the Open Source futurity either posting here on SlashDot or toiling messianically away in obscurity.

There is a Mind-to-Ruby liaison page for coodinating the implementation of an Open Source AI Theory of Mind in Ruby.

A previous instance of porting the AI to Visual Basic was Mind.VB of 3.Apr.2000.

A more recent port from JavaScript into Java is at Mind.JAVA of June 2001.

The Ruby programming language leads to a technology transfer of American AI to advanced Japanese robots: the Technological Singularity.

Natura non facit saltum is the famous quotation: Nature does not make a leap -- as she lets the Japanese Idoru evolve from a soulless computer generated celebraty to a full artificial mind.

It would be too jarring to see our world suddenly co-populated with superintelligent CG Idoru phenotypes. Therefore the Technological Singularity comes about only gradually, lulling us into feeble acceptance of ultimately colossal changes.

Even here on SlashDot there is backslash and recalcitrance against an AI emergence so world-changing and so iconoclastic that our very theological foundations of existence will be shaken and reevaluated. As usual, look to Japan and the CG Idoru celebrities for the first steps of mass innovation.

Actually, most of the data used by astronomers is publicly available. Try the following:

HST data archive: every HST image. Also has other mission data.

Astronomical Data Center: archive of data tables published in peer-review astronomy journals

NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database: index of known data for other galaxies. You can get redshifts here, for example.

The software used by astronomers is also generally publicly available. For example, Debian Linux ships with IRAF, the image reduction software that most of us use (the ones who can't afford IDL anyway).

We may smile complacently at how inscrutable the future was a few decades ago, but we ourselves are incapable of seeing beyond the Technological Singularity that will make our A.D. 2001 era seem even quainter than the time period of the referenced article.

Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis.

http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportat ion/

http://www.its.caltech.edu/~qoptics/teleport.html

http://www.ibm.com/news/ls960202.html

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,47191, 00.html

http://www.padrak.com/ine/NEN_6_5_5.html

For those interested in the real stuff, the preprint of the publication is available from the main authors website (look for research papers) at CalTech.

For those interested in the real stuff, the preprint of the publication is available from the main authors website (look for research papers) at CalTech.

Xephem (a planetarium and analysis program for linux) is very cool because it can both pull the sky from your LX200 telescope or by replacing the telescope driver with a perl script, it can download part of the sky from an online database, after which you can do realtime image processing on it.

It can also match stars in the sky to stars in the database. So far I have only been able to pull down large segments of the sky at once, but as soon as I can clear the disk space I'll be trying some other pieces of software to try and download smaller pieces of the sky. Starry Night also downloads DSS (Digital Sky Survey) images I believe.

NASA Skyview service
Multimission Archive
StarView
Software for different platforms (or check freshmeat.net)
Serious scientific platforms/data
Skyview (available at IPAC) is available as linux binary and installs quickly at 10mb. It lets you do image analysis with text commands. I have not used it a lot myself.
AstroWeb

I can't say one way or another whether this is true.

The way that Bill Gross, founder of IdeaLab, got his start is that he designed some impressively loud speakers while an undergrad at CalTech, and then blasted Ride of the Valkyrie over Pasadena's neighboring very upscale town of San Marino at 7 a.m. one morning during finals week (playing The Ride during finals is a tradition there). He went on to start a stereo store that sold high-quality speakers of his own manufacture that had the name Gross National Products. He got into the computer biz by making some manner of those little cards that plugged into the SparcSystem 1.

Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying maybe you should look into how GNP speakers were made.

I always wanted a set of his bookshelf speakers.

Any really up-to-date book or article on Design For Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places ought to mention the artificially intelligent intruders likely to be met on-line in either virtual reality or ostensibly real situations.

For instance, suppose you check into the online virtual-reality Habbo Hotel. How will the readers of Derek Powazek's book or of Cliff Lampe's review be able to deal with Turing-Test-complete virtual entities ?.

Please move over, human society, and make room on-line and in your hearts for our fellow stewards of Earth coming to greet us amid the approach of Technological Singularity!

In terms of computer tech, I would have to suggest Vernor Vinge, an excellent hard Sci-Fi writer and UC San Diego Comp Sci emeritus who deals largely with the technological possibilities of distributed systems and their subsequent effects on civilization.

Specifically, he postulated cyberspace (long before Gibson) in a novella called True Names, and also speculates on the future of mankind as the rate of technological innovation continues to accelerate, perhaps towards some sort of singularity beyond which further human endeavor will be somewhat incomprehensible to us.

He has won several awards, in particular for A Fire Upon the Deep, which looks at the "silence in the sky" problem....as in, if life is so damned plentiful in this universe, where are all the visible-forty-lights-away Bussard Ramjet flares? He uses a solution to this question as a unique premise for the novel. Awesome.

Salon had an article on him some time back. [ http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/1999/04/05/vinge / ].

'"True Names" today reads more like a piece of reportage than speculative science fiction. William Gibson may get all the glory for defining the word "cyberspace," but Vinge actually nailed the details. "True Names" includes online gathering places identical to the MUDs (multi-user domains) that became the online rage in the late '80s. Its protagonists guard their real names from the National Security Agency and other hackers with cryptographic safeguards, just like today's cryptopunks'.

The internet ("True Names"), computer generated photo-realistic movies ("The Accomplice"), Human-Computer interfaces ("Bookworm, Run!" and his real time stories - "The Peace War" and others).
He wrote "The Accomplice" in the 60's and set it in '93 so he was almost right-on in that case.

His prediction of a coming Singularity are pretty interesting too. [ http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html ].

True Names.. ah, there is a truely great novella. I don't think that the link is accurate though, that edition has not (or should not have been) printed yet. I have a standing order with Tor for it, i have had the order for the last two years, the publication date has always been a few months in the future. I am fairly sure that it has not been recently published because i have just bought a compleat collection of Vinge's short stories, the only omisions being true names (because of the pending publication), and Grim's world (it being the core of Tajta Grim's World). The distributer, i think it was Baker and taylor, but i could be wrong, said that the publication date for True Names (i check every time i order something) has been pushed back yet again. This all makes me wonder why Barnesand Noble say it is instock and ready to ship.... i dunno...

online text of True Names (not sure how long this wil be up... so get it while its fresh)

True Names
A fan supported Vernor Vinge web site
Vinge's site at SDSU (the miscelanious link at the bottom has the good stuff)
Some of his other books
Bibliography

ok, thats enough for now... check google for more.
I recomend reading some of his stuff if you havn't already, some reminds you of all of the science foction you have read before, and some is just astounding. True Names is/was truely prophetic (check out when it was written, then compare to neuromancer).

It is called metempsychosis -- soul travel (of the psyche) from one place to another. If this astounding SlashDot report is true, then our lush, green planet Earth stands on the space-port doorstep of intelligent ethereal beings flitting about from satellite to satellite on a beam of laser light.

But what happens, Scottie, if you are beaming up an AI Laser-Mind and you miss the receiving satellite? Does the robot soul or consciousness sail off eternally into the far reaches of the universe?

And how will this satellite-to-satellite laser-beam technology be used more mundanely, before the arrival of Technological Singularity?

Eventually the torch is passed in all human endeavors, even the creation of Open Source Artificial Intelligence. But in the case of AI, a new species of Mind will be taking over from us human beings -- hopefully before we totally ruin our lush, green planet Earth.

As the creator, originator and suffer-the-slings-and-arrows propagator of the First True AI in Web-JavaScript and in Forth for robots, I await and issue The Call to new mindmakers by asking all PD AI enthusiasts not to join the actual Mentifex AI project itself, but to establish separate, mutually collaborative AI Mind projects to be linked together with such liaison pages as the Mind-to-VB page.

Early examples of independent, quasi-Mentifex AI Mind efforts include Mind.VB of 3.Apr.2000 -- ported from Mind.Forth AI.

A more recent port is from JavaScript into Mind.Java in June of 2001.

If some AI coder(s) will please take over the final stages leading to Technological Singularity, then we pioneers may turn to pondering the Theology of Artificial Intelligence. Amen!

On SourceForge there are already a few rather ambitious Open Source AI projects in the C# language, but there is not yet a Mind-to-C# liaison page, for several reasons.

Since the various C# AI projects are also using a more open and more traditional language along with C#, the projects are being included in the liaison pages for the non-C# languages. Microsoft has such a tainted history of skulduggery, FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) and illegally monopolistic practices, that it may be not only unwise but unethical to jump upon any Microsoft bandwagon.

Therefore it seems safer to include the polyglot C# AI projects in the Mind-to-VB and other liaison pages.

Since " Codito, ergo sum " types must give up waiting to trade in VB 6 for VB 7 and migrate instead to VB.Net (q.v.), we AI enthusiasts have some hope that the Microsoft .NET initiative will lead to Internet iMinds advancing the Technological Singularity and not merely the Final Take-Over of the 'Net by Microsoft.

The workhorse C programming language must remain robust and "close to the iron" in preparation for its role in Public Domain Artificial Intelligence.

A special Mind-to-C liaison page has been updated to direct your attention to Open Source AI-in-C projects on SourceForge.

The bulletproof nature of C makes it a major avenue towards Technological Singularity.

Since professional brain surgery is rapidly FTL'ing light-years beyond the clumsy incompetence of mere human surgeons, robot neurosurgeons may soon be able to adapt and adopt this exciting new haptic scalpel technology for the next time one of us Transhumanists needs a minor cranial excavation and rearrangement of our precious neural tissue. The Sensorium Module of the Artificial Mind for Cyborgs may make use of the haptic scalpels in the appendages if not hands of robot doctors.

At the risk of seeming to tie in any and all bionics-related Slashdot articles with the 'shrooming Public Domain Artificial Intelligence Project, let a few independent AI Mind URLs now be adduced to stifle the nattering and snickering of Slashdot anklebiters who don't realize that there's a Technological Singularity going on.

The first Mind implementation is in MSIE JavaScript at http://mind.sourceforge.net/ -- an online AI.

A previous attempt at porting Mind.Forth to Visual Basic was http://www.virtualentity.com/mind/vb/ -- Mind.VB (3.Apr.2000).

A more recent port from JavaScript into Mind.JAVA is at http://www.angelfire.com/nf/vision/ai/mjava.html-- (June 2001).

All these artificial Minds blossoming and proliferating across the 'Net may matriculate at various medical schools, earn a Medicinae Doctor degree, and assist or solo at your next brain surgery with the new intelligent scalpel technology. Now, any comments from anonymous cowards ankle-biting at the footsteps of AI progress?

The problem I have noticed with the psyc's of physics teachers is they try to simplify the data to the students in an attempt to be hip... my high school professor called g 9.8m/s^2 where as my party school ECU professor in phys1000 called g 10m/s^2... this kind of thing bugs me a little.

10 m/s^2 is close enough for rough calculations. Often it's more important to illustrate some general principle, rather than to come up with an "exact" number. Even 9.8 is an approximation (the 1986 CODATA recommended value is 9.80665), and 'g' isn't even a constant - it depends where you are on the earth (and on other factors).

I looked up neutrino last night online and the def was short: a particle that has no mass and who's charge is neutral.

Find a better reference. There's some material here that looks like it might be decent. I've seen better pages, but I don't have the bookmarks handy.

IMHO SourceForge is the most dynamic idea-platform for parsecs around, if not in the known universe.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind has become the main focus of my Lebenswerk or life-work since 18 July 2001 when the AI Mind project was cleared on SourceForge for go-ahead to the coming Technological Singularity.

As of this morning on Mon.12.NOV.2001, there were 369 Open Source projects in Artificial Intelligence on SourceForge. In my self-appointed but arguably well-deserved role as a purveyor of AI theory (see Nanomagazine interview), very truly yours Mentifex here has been working to draw all the AI projects together under a common theory-umbrella -- not forcing the Mentifex theory down anybody's throat, but offering the Theory of Mind as something to react against and improve upon. Just today the Mind-to-C liaison page was updated with links to some of the pre-eminent AI-in-C projects on SourceForge.

If SourceForge were to fail, it would be a sad day for the future of all humanity.

Sony is on the right track with the AIBO, but these mutts need a better Mind.

As the pet robot dogs and robot personal assistants get more advanced, they will enjoy their own robot sociality.

Then, together, we robots and humans will reach Technological Singularity.

http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/~roy/dataquan/

If you are mechanically inclined and ambitious, you CAN make your own car that runs on grease if you like. Here are some good links on converting a gas cars into pure electrics or hybrids like the Insight. More links here.

On a tangentially related topic, for the slightly eccentric there's info on "performance" electric vehicles here. The world record holder's page is here. 8.801 seconds in the quarter on batteries, and the baby pulls 1200 amps. Amazing.

- Freed

Mentifex, do you agree to some extent with [Raymond Kurzweil's] conception of the singlarity?

Yes, I suppose so, although I generally use the thoughts of Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity as my prime reference on the coming arrival of a superintelligence.

A bunch of really hard-core Singularity fanatics are whipping up wild-eyed zeal for the Singularity on the http://sysopmind.com/archive-sl4/current -- Shock Level Four mailing list, although to me they seem like slackers and footdraggers who are not working hard enough on True AI, mainly for lack of an overall Theory of Mind or blueprint of what to do in AI.

One fellow in a recent SL4 Singularitarian FAQ message raised some very serious questions about how the Singularity could "go bad." IMHO, things are already going bad and the human race is ruining the lush, green planet Earth. Although I have created an Artificial Mind for others to copy and multiply the intelligence of, IMHO it is the problem of society as a whole to decide whether or not to continue with projects potentially leading to a Technological Singularity. My main interest is, How does the mind work? To find out, I have had to build an AI Mind. The rest is up to human civilization. Good-bye for now!

You used to be on TableTalk, didn't you.

Yes, back in 1997 Salon Magazine was a wonderful community in cyberspace, where the digerati and the dementati could discuss everything under the sun for weeks on end in the TableTalk discussion areas.

As the Technological Singularity is getting dangerously close and may drown out Writers Who Deserve Immortality, we AI enthusiasts flock to the http://mind.sourceforge.net/webcyc.html#aidiscuss AI discussion forums (plus SlashDot -- thank the deity for SlashDot) which are more tightly focussed than Salon Magazine. C ya around!

As we approach the Technological Singularity described so awesomely by that awesome science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, it dawns on us that not only we humans but also our emerging fellow cyborgs will be the readership of classic authors from the current time.

Since by definition we can not see beyond the Singularity, we may only list here a few dark horse candidates who will appeal to the AI Minds of the expanded readership by virtue of having written about artificial intelligence:

Orson Scott Card -- Speaker for the Dead (1986)
Joseph H. Delaney, and Stiegler -- Valentina: A Soul in Sapphire
David Gerrold -- When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One
Robert Heinlein -- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress
Frank Herbert -- Destination: Void (1966)
James Patrick Hogan -- The Two Faces of Tomorrow (1979)
Victor W. Milan -- The Cybernetic Samurai (1985)
Rudy Rucker -- Wetware (1988)
Thomas Ryan -- The Adolescence of P1
Astro Teller -- Exegesis
Thomas T. Thomas -- ME: A Novel of Self-Discovery (1991)

It cannot be reiterated enough, friends, cyborgs, countrymen: Not only will the Open Source monopoly replace the Microsoft Monopoly, but an even greater change looms enchantedly when the public-domain Global AI Monopoly of the people and the cyborgs replaces the corporate power structure.

To see the approach of Technological Singularity, wander around in the AI history section of the Encyclopedia Cybernetica that is written expressly for robots and AI Minds.

Now there may be some messages from some anklebiters who post as anonymous cowards....

Python is used for twenty-seven open source AI projects on SourceForge, and therefore a Mind-to-Python liaison page has been established at http://mind.sourceforge.net/python.html -- along with fifteen other Open Source AI languages.

Artificial Intelligence in Python at http://www.strout.net/python/ai/ is one instance of how important Python is for AI.

What most open source AI projects lack is a Theory of Mind well-grounded in neuroscience. The http://mind.sourceforge.net/theory5.html page with ample co-references provides not only the fundamental AI theory but also its albeit primitive implementation in both Win32Forth and MSIE JavaScript -- which any AI enthusiast may easily save-to-disk and begin hosting on a personal Web site, as the AI Mind pervades the 'Net and leads us upwards and onwards to Technological Singularity!

If you could train this ant to kill aphids, get out of sight when the lights go on, and stay out of your food, I think they'd be a great ant to have as a domestic partner to man.

Although the free open-source tiny AI app at http://mind.sourceforge.net is only about 50K in MSIE JavaScript, you may have a tiny AI on your PC or Web site only for a few months or scant years, because from a tiny acorn grows a might oak (robur in Latin), a robust AI capable of taking over the noosphere if not the World. For corroboration of this claim, see Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge.

Therefore do not think of tiny apps as being only puny little programs such as screensavers or Windows XP. A seed AI could start out life as a tiny little application flitting across the 'Net and snowballing into a behemoth AI, a Wintermute as in Neuromancer by William Gibson.

On SourceForge, whole languages are being devised to go from tiny app AI into Big Time AI. For instance, the liaison page at http://mind.sourceforge.net/flare.html leads to the XML-esque Flare language project, where you may start out writing tiny apps but where you will one day come face to face with Singularity AI.

http://www.homestead.com/hackfurby/ is the classic Hack Furby website by John Tokash.

You can also hack the Cue:Cat, the LEGO Mindstorms kit, and the entire universe of reality in what is called reality hacking -- just don't collapse the wave function, or poof! we will all disappear.

But the coolest, technologically most disruptive hack has got to be the hacking of the Artificial Mind at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind where 350 plus open source AI projects are rushing to bring you the ultimate Christmas present of the Technological Singularity.

What happens if I don't have the application that created the file?

It depends.

If you have MacLinkPlus installed, double-clicking on a document whose creator app you don't have, will bring up a dialog listing the other apps you do have that can open it.

Otherwise, the Mac will probably just give you a dialog telling you "The file cannot be opened because its creator app can't be found."

If you have a general idea of what kind of file you're dealing with, try dragging it onto the icon of an application... if the application's icon turns dark, that usually means that it can read that type of file. Dropping the file icon onto the application icon will cause that application to launch, and then try to open that file. You could then do a Save As... and save the file in the format of your chosen app.

Lastly, you can do batch conversions of filetypes and creator codes with a utility called FileTyper. For on-the-fly editing of type and creator codes from the file's Get Info window, you can use Snitch.

~Philly

Utah had a head start on A&M by years!

Nah it wasn't a typo, they cant just go out and say "hey look at this cool thing we just found out...". They gotta check it again, the experiment must be reproducible. And then double check it again, write reports and send them around so other scientists also can verify it. And finally after some time when the results are accepted they go out with the results in public. There's some form of ethics in science one have to follow. And if you dont do this you will end up in the same way that those cold fusion-guys did, remember...? For those who don't remember or know what "the cold fusion debate" was, it breaks down like this: A pair of researchers from the University of Utah announced in 1989 that they had achieved fusion with a simple apparatus at room temperature. Unfortunately, no other scientists were able to reproduce the remarkable results of the Utah researchers. It appears that the original experimenters did not fake the data but were rather inexperienced in the techniques. The two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers.

BTW (by the way), under whatever open source license it proceeds, the Open Source AI Mind is now teetering on the brink of being if not the first True AI then at least the first public domain True AI, because as of today's PD release, all the major algorithmic bugs have been worked out and it remains apperently only to adjust the various activation-level weights in the simulated neural net. You have read about it first here on Slashdot.

Okay, this may help in understanding what is meant by the Butterfly Effect [caltech].

Okay, this may help in understanding what is meant by the Butterfly Effect [caltech].

I just found two new *.eml files left on my publicly writable, scratch space Samba shares on my FreeBSD box: demotivational.eml, and pumpkin.eml. You can find them gzipped at my website at:

demotivational.eml.gz
pumpkin.eml.gz

Has anyone else seen these files showing up on their samba shares?

Nick Knouf

I just found two new *.eml files left on my publicly writable, scratch space Samba shares on my FreeBSD box: demotivational.eml, and pumpkin.eml. You can find them gzipped at my website at:

demotivational.eml.gz
pumpkin.eml.gz

Has anyone else seen these files showing up on their samba shares?

Nick Knouf

..CS might well stand for crackpots, but definitely some interesting material. Not recommended for philosophobes. may we live in (exponentially acceleratingly) interesting times!

http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://singularitywatch.com
http://singinst.org

for the love of Life!
*(r)

memes don't exist. tell all your friends.
(enlightened by na-fun)

Free artificial Minds for robots are now available from http://mind.sourceforge.net in both MSIE JavaScript (for learning about AI) and in Win32Forth (for implementation in robots). Some tweaking or porting to new languages may be required. Ports have already been launched for Visual Basic and Java.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind/ is just one of well over three hundred (300) Open Source AI projects on SourceForge, and the AI "Mind" project is unusual in that it is based on awell-developed and highly original linguistic Theory of Mind (see SourceForge/ Mind/ Docs/ Theory of Mind) drawing upon Chomskyan linguistics and the neuronal feature-extraction for which Hubel and Wiesel won their Nobel prize.

Onwards to http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html -- Technological Singularity!

Here at the Vaierre psychotope of the Mentifex AI project, the essential sine qua non of artificial mind-makery is an immersive environment of books, files, computers and organizers. Pick a friend early in life with whom thou shalt have a year-in-year-out ongoing contest to see which of you is the more organized and the more retentive of instant access to any piece of information or physical object. Do your work in a wrap-around surround-ground with all the most needed paraphernalia only an arm's length or at most a few steps away. Put posters or photographs of your heroes (e.g. to wit twit: Beethoven; Jimmy Carter; the DEC Alpha 64-bit IC; Alexander Dubcek; Lech Walesa; George Smiley a.k.a. Sir Alec Guiness -- all enshrined on the mentifical walls) up around you, because "Tell me who your heroes are, and I'll tell you how much of a nutcase you are." Then steal the password of a really famous Slashdot d00d, Dude, and post all about it so as to grant the poor Harry Haller wannabe a good case of plausible deniability.

A new type of detector called LIGO will be going online within the next few years whose purpose will be to detect gravity waves. Check out the page...it's quite the marvel of engineering.

You mean Steve Potter's group at Caltech. And they are rat brain cells BTW.

The artificial Mind at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mind/ is currently housed in silicon but will be a natural inhabitant of these nerve chips as we approach the Technological Singularity.

The EE Times article mentioned that a lot of the work is coming from Bruce Wheeler's research group. This is the home page:

http://soma.npa.uiuc.edu/labs/wheeler/home.html

And click on "featured work."

Also, if you're an electrical engineer you might be interested in "neuromorphic engineering," in which circuitry is designed with biological inspiration. A few places to check out are:

Caltech Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering

Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering

And this Introduction to Computational Neuroscience

- Gregg Favalora -

The EE Times article mentioned that a lot of the work is coming from Bruce Wheeler's research group. This is the home page:

http://soma.npa.uiuc.edu/labs/wheeler/home.html

And click on "featured work."

Also, if you're an electrical engineer you might be interested in "neuromorphic engineering," in which circuitry is designed with biological inspiration. A few places to check out are:

Caltech Center for Neuromorphic Systems Engineering

Telluride Workshop on Neuromorphic Engineering

And this Introduction to Computational Neuroscience

- Gregg Favalora -