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The vascular part I am guessing / noting / observing.. it's a ,thing I noted a long time ago is all.

  The rest of it is information readily available . The general topic goes by the name of neural plasticity which is broken down into functional and structural .

It's not the thing I research specifically so I am not loaded down with bookmarks for you but I know all about it from undergrad

For people with no neuroscience background there's books like The Brain That Changes Itself and of course it's a big area of research- pulled from the web without much effort:

http://education.jhu.edu/PD/newhorizons/Neurosciences/articles/Response%20of%20the%20Brain%20to%20Enrichment/

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/29/10/3019.full.pdf

http://psyserv06.psy.sbg.ac.at:5916/fetch/PDF/21906988.pdf

http://www.medicaldaily.com/talk-therapy-reverses-biological-structural-brain-changes-ptsd-patients-264229

Some notes on one methodology:

http://dbm.neuro.uni-jena.de/pdf-files/May-TICS11.pdf

Aside from that, what exactly do you think phenomena like PTSD are? Purely disembodied psychological issues? If you've were or have ever repeatedly sustained hard study, you'd notice that your whole "self" changes in response to your efforts. You're smarter, your experience of everyday life is richer etc etc. This goes on as long as you're willing to inflict a good measure of discomfort on yourself.

By the same token, leaving your studies for a time then coming back is an extraordinarily punishing affair. Along with feelings of inadequacy and bewilderment when faced with the same material you left even a few short weeks ago, there's a sense of awe at your own former self's output and level of functioning.

Like the song says:

When you're up / looks like a long ways down
When you're down / looks like a long ways up

Cheers

I believe you are missing the more important point (most of you in this thread). 'Random' is usually used as short for 'uniformely random' and would ultimately mean that any sequence of draws has an a priori equal probability to any other sequence of the same fixed length. Pseudo random generators do not have this property for long strings and most external events can't be guaranteed to have this property. The generators can be pretty good however, something that is often meassured by Spectral Tests (somewhat empirically). So when researchers talk about pseudo-randomness vs. true randomness, it is usually not so much about whether someone could predict the numbers as about whether long sequences have a truly uniform distribution.

In particular, simple classical PRNGs with internal states of 32 bits may have a cycle of about 2^31 numbers, i.e. the 2^31+1'st number you draw will always be the same as the first. Apparently the PRNG of theoretical choice today, the Mersenne Twister has a cycle of 2^19937-1.

You might want to go to Salzburg this summer to attend the Quantum Mind conference. You'll find a number of top physicists, a few philosophers, some famous mathematicians, and at least one anaesthesiologist (hey, you don't know what you've got till it's gone).

• There are 85 ways to tie a tie
• Only 10 are symmetrical
• The most known is a Windsor knot

On Solaris 7 and 8 I use a kernel space /dev/random from Andreas Maier. I have successfully compiled it on both 32bit and 64bit machines using the SunPRO 5.0 compiler. To use it with OpenSSH, install the package, recompile OpenSSL and OpenSSH.

In my opinion using the kernel space /dev/random removes most of the negative issues associated with running OpenSSH on Solaris.

Trey

Haven't you come across this which gives you a /dev/random (and /dev/urandom) - even on 2.5.1?

The best current RNG testing suite is DIEHARD. It uses a large number of tests to make sure that the numbers are random enough for most purposes. More information about RNGS and testing them can be found at the pLab which is one of most comprehensive sites on RNGs on the net.

Better would be to get an SBC that supports Linux, throw on a microdrive, add an 802.11b card, and then write a set of scripts that rsync to your home MP3 DB when you get in range of the access point (and after you exchange some cryptographic keys, of course). You can then use the apmd stuff to sleep your machine after the transfer.

I planned on using an old Palm IIIx and a serial cable for the GUI. PalmAMP works really well (for my purposes, anyway). Of course, it doesn't beat the Empeg's really fancy display. It's very nice. But worth an extra $500? Probably not.

Bad to see them go. Hopefully, they'll keep their software on the Net so others can play with it still.

-B

I read some of the Austrian StGB (Strafgesetzbuch = Penal Code) yesterday, and IMO there is nothing illegal about adultery there. Polygamy and incest are illegal. OTOH, there are some very questionable laws over there.

If you can read German fluently, the Austrian StGB is available here. The Swiss StGB is here and the German one is here.

This page should give you a good set of info and links.

PalmAMP from Ironcreek Software (looks like their site is goobered, but you can find the download by Googling still) and the PalmAMP XMMS plugin should do at least a big chunk of what you're trying to do. The XMMS plugin is GPL as well, so you can perhaps turn your FIFO daemon into a converter for the PalmAMP protocol, thus saving the time of writing the GUI.

You can use methods such as egd.pl (as described and linked for download at http://www.lothar.com/tech/crypto/) to gather entropy for random seeds and a third party /dev/random device driver such as the one at http://www.cosy.sbg.ac.at/~andi/ though. Also, OpenSSH has its own internal method of gathering entropy - such as running netstat and viewing the ps table.

You're not *that* dependent on the OS for randomness, it just takes a bit more work if you start with a hobbled one.