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"The Hawaii Medical Association said it wanted the issue to be studied more deeply because there was a lack of peer-reviewed evidence suggesting sunscreen is a cause of coral bleaching, and overwhelming evidence that not wearing sunscreen increases cancer rates."

Which translates into "We refuse to acknowledge the existence of peer-reviewed evidence specifically on this topic and have no countervailing peer-reviewed evidence of our own, thus that uncertainty means that the state should not act to protect corals because you just might be too lazy to switch sunscreen types..."

Finding ONE study does not refute the claim of "a lack of peer-reviewed evidence suggesting sunscreen is a cause of coral bleaching", given the piss-poor rate of reproducing scientific results:

The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) refers to a methodological crisis in science in which scientists have found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate/reproduce on subsequent investigation, either by independent researchers or by the original researchers themselves. The crisis has long-standing roots; the phrase was coined in the early 2010s as part of a growing awareness of the problem.

"The Hawaii Medical Association said it wanted the issue to be studied more deeply because there was a lack of peer-reviewed evidence suggesting sunscreen is a cause of coral bleaching, and overwhelming evidence that not wearing sunscreen increases cancer rates."

Which translates into "We refuse to acknowledge the existence of peer-reviewed evidence specifically on this topic and have no countervailing peer-reviewed evidence of our own, thus that uncertainty means that the state should not act to protect corals because you just might be too lazy to switch sunscreen types..."

You could install a WiMax basestation rural areas and have a line of sight microwave link to the nearest place you can get a wired internet connection, or to the next base station.

https://www.tutorialspoint.com...

A WiMAX tower station can connect directly to the Internet using a high-bandwidth, wired connection (for example, a T3 line). It can also connect to another WiMAX tower using a line-of-sight microwave link.

Problem is of course that you'd need to make sure you had enough subscribers to make it profitable before you did it. On the upside you could spread out quite fast this way - so long as the base stations are either in WiMax or microwave range they can talk to each other. So initially you'd put them at the edges of cities where they can get a wired connection and power. Then you'd add ones which talked to them. Eventually you'd be building them way out in the country. You can actually get ones which run off solar and batteries

http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~zakhi...

I think you'd fall foul of regulations though. Aka 'people trying to protect their monopoly which lets them sell shitty, overpriced services to a captive audience who have no alternative'.

See if this has anything useful: http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/neat_s...

http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanle...

And why were mold spores allowed to come into the plant growth facility?

LOL, what??? Are you joking??

A quick google says that mold spores are 3 to 40 microns.

Allowed?? How the hell do you plan on filtering out everything on the 3-40 micron scale? From the same article:

they are literally everywhere. There is no reasonable, reliable and cost-effective means of eliminating them from environments that humans inhabit. So, trying to control mold growth through the elimination of mold spores is not feasible.

You clearly don't understand what you're talking about.

Nobody "allows" mold spores in. Nobody can really prevent them.

Florida here.

Here is a minimal sample plan for in-state Florida college (where we didn't screw things up):
Insurance - covered at the student health center (catastrophic covered by parent)
Food - $100/month, rice/beans (my budget as an adult) - $1200/year
Tuition - 39credits/year @ 212.28/cr = $8.2K/year (source: http://tuitionfees.ikm.ucf.edu...)
Transportation - Bicycle, SERIOUSLY
Housing - offcampus w/shuttle @ $600/month (includes utilities and roommates, "luxury living" source: http://www.livesomewhere.com/c...) - $7.2K/year
MISC - haircuts, bike repairs, incidentals, pocket money, $100/month = $1200/year

Cost - 17.8K/year.

But how will someone ever pay for this?

Part time job at campus library at lowest-salary-university-will-pay-you. 20hours/week @ $8/hour = $8K/year.

Assuming that tuition never goes up and the student never obtains a marketable skill (dishwashing @ $10/hour, CAD drawing at $12/hour, copywriting @ $15/hour, freelance website design @ $20/hour, etc.), college costs about $10K/year, or $40K for the total package.

Note that a "student paying their own way, working their through college on minimum wage" is actually an option. Minimum wage is nearly $8/hour. 40 hours of minimum wage is $16K/year, which is just enough to cover college when considering the Earned Income Tax Credit and Making Education Pay Tax Credit.

Additionally note that no scholarships were to be had in the above calculations. Florida has a program called "Bright Futures" whereby a student with 1170 SAT score can get tuition 100% covered for all 4 years of college (cost reduced to $10K/year).

Quite frankly, one of the options that I frequently see underrated is simply helping out a professor.

As an example, my local university (University of Central Florida) was hiring for a position in IT support for exoplanet discovery.
http://planets.ucf.edu/people/...
http://planets.ucf.edu/researc...

They were looking for someone with a background in IT/process managment/cloudsourcing to help with keeping their cluster computing infrastructure up/functional. I'm sure that they would have accepted a "volunteer" at 50% of the pay who had IT experience (even if only 10 hours/week).

You can get surprising results by simply walking down to the state college during a professor's office hours and asking if they would like any help. You will learn a lot, and will be more useful than the undergraduates.

Quite frankly, one of the options that I frequently see underrated is simply helping out a professor.

As an example, my local university (University of Central Florida) was hiring for a position in IT support for exoplanet discovery.
http://planets.ucf.edu/people/...
http://planets.ucf.edu/researc...

They were looking for someone with a background in IT/process managment/cloudsourcing to help with keeping their cluster computing infrastructure up/functional. I'm sure that they would have accepted a "volunteer" at 50% of the pay who had IT experience (even if only 10 hours/week).

You can get surprising results by simply walking down to the state college during a professor's office hours and asking if they would like any help. You will learn a lot, and will be more useful than the undergraduates.

Unless you're calling your local Comcast office you're calling across state lines. If you do anything across state lines it falls to the Feds which are 1 party.

Unless one party is in California.
See this for an interesting analysis.

BIOS malware can install System Management Mode code that logs keystrokes. Please read: http://www.phrack.com/issues.h... http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/~czou/...

The actual trend is that there have been significant changes in the rates of hijacking, and you apparently don't know what the hell you're talking about.

The Contagiousness of Aircraft Hijacking

In the mid-1960s there were only a handful of hijacking attempts, including several attempts to and from Cuba and some isolated hijackings in Hawaii, However, ... the hijacking rate in the United States increased dramatically in 1968 and remained high through 1972, A similar increase occurred in hijacking attempts outside the United States. There were two peaks in the rate of U.S. hijacking activity during that period, one early in 1969 and one in 1972 ... The first peak consisted primarily of hijackings by individuals seeking transportation to Cuba, whereas the second consisted primarily of extortion attempts. ...

The hijacking rate in the United States began to decline in late 1972 and never again reached the high level of the period 1968-72. In the 10-year period 1973-82, there Was an average of only 9.3 hijacking attempts in the United States per year, compared with 29 attempts per year for 1968-72. Foreign hijackings also decreased after 1972, though not as sharply as U.S. hijackings.

The actual advantage of Java lies mainly --there are other advantages of course-- in the JiT compiler. This allows for run-time optimization that isn't possible at compile time. Which makes Java fast(er) in certain situations (and slow(er) in others). Here's an extensive stackoverflow discussion covering the topic.

Another great thing about Java is that you have a type-safe language (although you can break it in some cases -- particularly certain casts). This also makes it much easier to write secure code in Java through the use of software verification. For more on that, refer to this page on JML (Java Modelling Language) or OpenJML. Microsoft (as well as many others) has done a lot on the C/C++ side of verification (see also this discussion).

"...not put in a new medical school for over 30 years..."

What about this at Univ. of Central Florida? http://med.ucf.edu/about/

... too many people keep saying that tidal and wave power will "run out" if we try to harness it.

Technically true, but not because extracting tidal energy will cause the Moon to move closer to the Earth. In fact, the Moon would recede from the Earth even faster, resulting in an imperceptibly small decrease in tide heights, because lunar tide heights are proportional to the inverse cube of the distance between the Moon and the Earth.

Thanks for reminding me that i had things wrong - but at the same time mind doing the math for the correct answer?

Extracting tidal energy would cause the Moon to move away faster, so one could ask "how much potential energy would the Moon gain by moving away from the Earth by 1 km?" Well, G = 6.67x10^(-11) m^3 kg^(-1) s^(-2) and m1 = mass of Earth = 6x10^24 kg and m2 = mass of Moon = 7.3x10^22 kg.

The (current) average distance from the Earth to the Moon is r = 384,399 km. So the potential energy of the Moon in its current spot is -7.60007x10^28 J. (Gravitational potential energy is negative.) Moving the Moon 1 km away from the Earth raises its potential energy to -7.60005x10^28 J, an increase of 2x10^23 J.

But, as I pointed out, the Moon's gravitational potential energy isn't the source of tidal energy. The rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is. The Moon's ascent from Earth would be a byproduct of extracting tidal energy, not the source of that energy.

The lunar ocean tide M2 currently dissipates ~2.4 TW of power. The Moon is receding at a rate of ~3.8 cm per year which is slowing the Earth's rotation by ~2 ms per century.

Knowing that the rotational kinetic energy of the Earth is the source of tidal energy, we can approximate the Earth as a solid uniform sphere which has a moment of inertia of I = 2/5 m1 a^2, where a = mean radius of Earth = 6371 km. So the Earth's moment of inertia is 9.74x10^37 kg m^2. Since KE = 1/2 I omega^2, and omega = 2*pi/sidereal_period (currently 23 hours, 56 minutes, 4.091 seconds), the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is currently 2.59001833x10^29 J. In 100 years, the Earth's sidereal period will be ~2 ms longer, at which point the Earth's rotational kinetic energy will be 2.59001821x10^29 J, a decrease of 1.2x10^22 J.

The lost rotational kinetic energy is converted into frictional heat on the ocean floor and continental boundaries, and some of it goes into raising the Moon's orbit. Thus we can perform a sanity check by verifying that the energy gained by the Moon is smaller than the lost kinetic energy of the Earth. If 1 km of lunar recession is worth 2x10^23 J, then using a linear approximation 3.8 cm of recession each year is worth 7.6x10^18 J of additional potential energy each year, or 0.24 TW. Each year, the Earth's rotational kinetic energy drops by 1/100 the amount it does each century, which means 1.2x10^20 J are lost each year, or 3.8 TW. (Note that this is close to the 3.7 TW reported by Munk and Wunsch.)

So the Earth's rotational kinetic energy is the source of tidal energy. It's decreasing faster than lunar potential energy is increasing, which is physically plausible. Roughly 6% of the lost rotational kinetic energy goes into raising the Moon's orbit. The rest is converted to heat by friction and turbulence.

Dr. Zhai's faculty web page mentions conductivity and chemical sensitivity but not battery applications.

Battery electrolytes need more properties than just being conductive.

There's NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) largely by Ken Stanley. There are extensions to that like HyperNEAT and Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs).

I am interested in other approaches too...

There's NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) largely by Ken Stanley. There are extensions to that like HyperNEAT and Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPNs).

I am interested in other approaches too...

http://aboutwebcourses.ucf.edu/

I attend UCF, and they do allow it. There are many ways to go over a student's case, but they would probably choose a Formal Hearing, which calls for their advisor, the teacher, and the student. Because that would take forever for 200 students, I'm sure they pander to cheats and liars not only because there are so many, but because the admins are lazy, too.

Source: My memory (take it as you will) and http://goldenrule.sdes.ucf.edu/docs/OSC%20Section%20(Students)%202010.pdf

A quick search of their website shows that apparently it does.

What do you mean "genetic-genetic"? The only thing that I can see that might be missing is a reference to "sexual reproduction" or "mating" in TFA, but I don't think that's strictly necessary for a GA. I especially liked the potential for "junk DNA" to build up. In my own simulations, chromosomes did either something or nothing consistently; perhaps it's just the domain that he's working in, but it certainly lends itself to "situational" expression of a chromosome.

It's certainly no Evolvable Hardware, but it's still a pretty neat idea.

But not so many that you (or others) will find it more work than it's worth to change the comments when the code changes.

I prefer code with no comments to code with actively misleading comments, and I hate code with no comments! :)

The trick is that if you are writing comments describing what the code is intended to do, you can write those comments in something like JML or Frama-C's ACSL. That was you can use ESC/Java2 and Junit, or Frama-C, to do your checking that the code does what you intended. You get two benefits: more rigorous checks on your code (including use of theorem provers from ESC/Java and Frama-C); if your documentation ever falls out of date with the code, you'll immediately get errors flagged.

As a student of UCF (the university in the article) they actually do punish students if caught cheating. Not that I personally know of any case of it happening, but I have heard of it happening. You can view the academic policiy here.

I wouldn't worry about charting the signal strength for 3G. You can be in a densely populated area showing five bars of 3G and your speed and latency can still be dog shit depending on how many people are hitting the tower, similar to your cable modem. It might be worth it to record whether or not you have 3G just to help map out your general coverage, but that doesn't mean you'll have great speed. Although, you can find something like that here.

As for speed I like to use a util called iperf for measuring speed from one device to another across a network. You may have to open ports on your firewall or setup a VPN, which will add unwanted overhead, but you will get a good idea of which carriers have the best speeds. You can also run the simple tests using other websites like here or here.

The NYT article was actually pretty good, but for those who want a bit more 'meat on the bone', here's the 2009 research project report:
http://caracol.cos.ucf.edu/reports/2009.php
There are some nice examples of the LIDAR images at the end of the page in the Figures section.

Last year I took a graduate class on evolutionary neural networks. For the final project, a friend and I created a controller for this Infinite Mario competition. I started off knowing that it would not be as "good" at beating the levels as the previous year's winner, which used A* to calculate the absolute best path through each level. However, I decided that I wanted to create a controller that could perform well, but still act like it was a real person controlling it.

We used the NEAT algorithm to evolve a neural network that acted as the controller, and built sensors which detected certain on screen objects, as well as the character's current state, to act as the input to the network. (We also used Luigi, instead of Mario, as he is far superior).

In the end, we were able to evolve controllers that did very well, but didn't look too natural, because they usually favored jumping a lot, even when not needed. We were, however, also able to evolve some controllers that performed more natural, and interesting actions, such as intentionally killing enemies, hitting blocks, and going back for powerups. While these types of controllers may not have done as well in completing levels, they were more like what we were going for. Here is a link to the video showing our more interesting results:

Evolved Luigi Controller - Infinite Mario AI

Note that all the different colored lines represent the sensors we implemented. This is all that Luigi is actually "seeing". His sensors include rangefinders for obstacles, enemies, blocks, powerups, and special sensors for pits.

I found a nice little illustration of the effect temperature has on the equilibrium of this reaction here. The calculation is actually for the related reaction using carbon (as coke) instead of methane, but the equilibrium constants are about equal for the temperatures discussed here. At atmospheric conditions on Earth, the equilibrium can be considered as shifted completely to the left. Virtually no carbon monoxide is produced from this reaction at temperatures less than about 600K. At a temperature of 956.7K, the levels of carbon and carbon monoxide are equal, and at higher temperatures, carbon monoxide is On GJ 436b, with a temperature of 800K, the equilibrium should still strongly disfavor CO production, and the calculation suggests that there should be around 13.6 times as much carbon (or methane in the case of GJ 436b) as there is carbon monoxide.

However, the researchers determined that "GJ 436b's atmosphere is abundant in CO and deficient in methane (CH4) by a factor of ~7,000." The only way the planet could have gotten an atmosphere like that through this reaction equilibrium alone is if its temperature is really around 2000K instead of 800K. The researchers therefore argue that it's far more likely that some other mechanism is disrupting this equilibrium, like polymerization of methane that pulls it out of the system. In their Nature paper, they include a a chart of the atmospheric ratios of gas giants, both in our solar system and exoplanets; nothing else known has a CH4/CO ratio like that seen for GJ 436b.

And the only correct documentation is the code itself. Anything else is a opinion and should be viewed accordingly.

Of course the code itself only tells you what the code does, not what the code is supposed to do, nor why it is doing it. Note that the difference can be rather crucial in maintenance and bug fixing.

I don't know how many times over my 30 year career that I've read documentation and started work only to find out later that it hadn't been updated. The first standard in your documentation rules should be that all relevant documentation is created and updated before code goes into production. No excuses.

Which is why it's always nice to have documentation that can be tested against the code. Now the "why" part of documentation is rather hard to verufy against code, but the "what it is supposed to do" should be able to be automatically verified if it is sensibly written: for instance in Eiffel requires and ensures clauses, or in JML, or splint, or SPARK; which allow for varying levels of static checking, runtime assertions, and automatic unit test generation (depending on what you are using) to ensure that if code and documentation falls out of sync an error should be immediately flagged.

Current student of Ken Stanley in Neuroevolution and Generative Development this semester.

Parent is correct: The devil is in the details. A Neural Network is a _model_ of what actually happens in the brain. It is an approximation. There are a number of things that the model does not account for, such as the growth of new connections (somewhat accounted for in the GA-NN NEAT), and the exponential response nature (accounted for in CRTNN networks).

CPPNs are a model to account for generative development, rather than Neural Networks. The hope is to get a full system without going through the actual step-by-step constructive development of it. To this end, it is successful.

You can find more information about the subject, or implement your own CPPN network here: http://www.cs.ucf.edu/~kstanley/neat.html

The article presents a good argument that the ANN model is at least partially incorrect on its approximation of brain development. ANNs do not add connections after the topology is created. This could provide interesting new developments to the AI crowd.

It has also been used for various other things. My girlfriend is actually a part of that research group (EPLEX - http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/) ... It has been used for all kinds of things. Everywhere from evolving complex pictures to music generation to our future overlords: hyper evolved zombie dancers.

It has also been used for various other things. My girlfriend is actually a part of that research group (EPLEX - http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/) ... It has been used for all kinds of things. Everywhere from evolving complex pictures to music generation to our future overlords: hyper evolved zombie dancers.

Game design is not the same thing as programming. For most game companies, a special team writes the story line, sets the objectives, creates the art, ect, which is probably what most people think about when they play the video game. Programmers on the other hand, are more about following those sets of instructions to make the game do what the designers have laid out for them. There are schools that teach this if you can afford them. http://www.fiea.ucf.edu/ is one that boasts a 95% hire on rate in the industry after graduation. You can either take game design or game programming tracks. You do have to have a Bachelor's degree to get into that school because it is for a master's degree.

Sorry, there are UF, FSU, FAU, and FIU, as well as universities of Central, North, West, and South Florida. But no FU. GP is safe wrt Floridian institutions.

Please play again.

I find it interesting that the number of unique users at one of my alma maters' computer labs (a general-use lab located in the student union, a building which didn't exist in my time there) continues to climb, despite submitter "theodp" questioning why computer labs are still necessary and the headline announcing that campus computer labs are going to die this year.

Unfortunately, so does the ongoing slaughter of trees. Whatever happened to the paperless office/campus we were all promised a couple of decades ago?

Language skills take decades to develop. Walking and balance take decades to develop.

Oh, it's far, far worse than that. :) It took millions of years to evolve an organism that can learn language skills in a decade.

Clone it. Then start selectively breeding those AIs which perform best.

Now you're talking. :) Though the selection should be natural in some way, such that the selection process itself can become more complex over time.

Current evolutionary computation is still primitive in this respect, but it's getting better. Personally I think evolving neural networks and other evolution of complex systems is the right direction to go in, but I'm a bit biased in that regard. :)

I wonder if anyone has told these guys.... Or these guys?

Here are two great examples of using evolving neural networks to drive game AI:

Nero:
http://nerogame.org/

Galactic Arms Race
http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu/

They're both the brainchild of Kenneth Stanley.
His current research can be seen here:
http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/

Here are two great examples of using evolving neural networks to drive game AI:

Nero:
http://nerogame.org/

Galactic Arms Race
http://gar.eecs.ucf.edu/

They're both the brainchild of Kenneth Stanley.
His current research can be seen here:
http://eplex.cs.ucf.edu/

In a list like this the writer upgrades the commas in the names to semicolons. You do respect the comma and use them in their more important role as list separators. It's not pretty, but it's right. It's not easy being an English Major.

I call shenanigans. Yeah, I have a writing degree too, and what you're saying contradicts Strunk and White, and just about every other style guide I've ever read. And it contradicts every English textbook I've ever read. I can't find a decent copy of The Elements of Style online -- the only versions I can find are the original written by William Strunk, before E. B. White jumped in and expanded the book. However, I found plenty of other grammar-related sites online that agree with me:

• Wikipedia (yes, I know, but bear with me): Use a semicolon between items in a series containing internal punctuation: "There are several Waffle Houses in Atlanta, Georgia; Greenville, South Carolina; Gainesville, Florida; and Mobile, Alabama."
• From Grammar Monster's English Grammar Lessons: "Items in lists are usually separated with commas (as in the first example below). However, if the list items themselves contain commas, then semicolons can be used as separators."
  Interestingly enough, this article does discuss "promoting" commas to semicolons, but indicates clearly that the commas being promoted are the ones in between the list items and not the ones inside the list items themselves.
• Grammar Girl's blog: "I don't want to confuse you, but there is one situation where you use semicolons with coordinating conjunctions, and that's when you are writing a list of items and commas just don't do the job of separating them all. Here's an example: 'This week's book winners are Herbie in Milligan College, Tennessee; Matt in Irvine, California; and Jan in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.' Those are the real winners in this week's special Scott Sigler book giveaway, and they've each won a copy of his novel Earthcore, but the list also provides a great example of using semicolons in a list. Because each item in the list requires a comma to separate the city from the state, you have to use a semicolon to separate the items themselves."
• How to use the semicolon properly: "When you have a series of three or more items that normally would be separated by commas except that each individual item already has a comma in it, you use the semicolon between items."
• The University Writing Center at UCF: "Semicolons also separate elements of a list, if those elements contain internal commas. Semicolons replace commas in a list if using commas would make the list more ambiguous."
• And finally, this terse guide from LEO at St. Cloud State University.

So since you're hiding behind Anonymous Coward, either (a) you're not really an English Major, or (b) you are one, but apparently lack the conviction of certitude in your answer to sign your "name" to it. And that list I gave above isn't even comprehensive, it's just what I managed to find after a few minutes of searching with Google. I will, however, point out that at least two of the citations I gave are from respected educational institutions.

You, on the other hand, indirectly claim to be an authority when it's not at all clear whether you're truly an expert or not.

Cognitive Radio (also known as "Opportunistic Spectrum Access") was first coined in an IEEE journal and is now considered the holy grail of communications research by many electrical/communications engineers.

To understand cognitive radio one must first be familiar with software radio. The operating parameters of a traditional radio (center frequency, modulation type, bandwidth, etc.) are defined in hardware and static in type. A software radio is a device which, in affect, brings the "software to the antenna" i.e. replaces the encoder/modulator/awgn/slicer with software. This allows much more flexible radio devices as they can use any frequency, with any modulation type, etc.

The next thing we must understand is that spectrum is scarce and increasingly expensive. The FCC's old spectrum licensing paradigm of fixed frequency assignment is outdated and can easily be improved. Here's an example: Verizon Wireless ownes (say) 1800 MHz nationwide and at all times but, if I could ensure little to no interference with Verizon's operations in the middle of the desert or at 4AM, shouldn't I be able to sub-license (or sub-lease) the spectrum?

This is where cognitive radio comes in: they scan the spectrum looking for "holes" (barely used frequencies), adjust their center frequency accordingly, find the best modulation type, etc. and transmit/receive at these frequencies. This will open up a lot of spectrum (the FCC noted spectrum utilization typically varies between 15% and 85%) and decrease the cost of spectrum access (or make the FCC a ton of money either way). The problem is that the engineering challenges are formidable (hidden terminal problem, collaborative sensing, etc.) and expensive (if we make a mistake, me might knock Verizon off the air) but eventually fixed licensing will be a thing of the past and we'll have devices that will operate at whatever frequency/modulation type/etc. they determine best and pay per usage (or some similar model).

For more info:

http://www.eecs.ucf.edu/tccn/(The Technical Committee on Cognitive Networks (TCCN) of the IEEE Communications Society)

http://www.ieeep1900.org/ (IEEE Cognitive Radio Information Center)

http://www.sdrforum.org/pages/aboutSdrTech/relatedTechnologies.asp (SDR Forum)

I can't believe no one's touched on this yet.

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~fle/gazzaniga.html

Executive summary:

Neuropsychology student is studying split-brain patients- people with injuries or diseases that inhibit the hemispheres of the brain from communicating. Their brains function normally kind of, except no information is passed between the two hemispheres.

Speech, or more specifically, translating what you see into words, is predominantly handled by your left hemisphere. Your left visual field is handled by your right hemisphere, and your right visual field by your left.

One experiment he conducted was showing different pictures to each eye at the same time, and then asking the subject to point to a card showing a picture that relates to the image shown.

One subject was shown a picture a picture of a chicken claw to his right eye (left hem.), and a snow covered landscape to his left (right hem.). The subject then pointed to a chicken with his right hand (again, controlled by left hem), and a shovel with his left (right!). Obviously, the logic behind his choice was the claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to shovel snow. However, when asked to explain his choice, the subject responded with something to the tune of, "The claw belongs to a chicken, and you need a shovel to clean the chicken shed."

Even though acting independently he was able to correctly deduce the response, the lack of communication between the hemispheres meant that when his left hemisphere was trying to put it all into words, it was unable to recall why he chose the shovel from the right hemisphere of the brain.

Gazzaniga (the student conducting the test) believes that in the left hemisphere of the brain lies what he calls the interpreter: a part of your brain whose sole function is to try to rationalize what we do not understand. An evolved speculation machine. Like the article said, I probably served an evolutionary purpose in that it kept us paranoid and safe in the grasslands, but odds are this is also the same part of the brain that saw lightning and concluded there must be an unseen humanoid in the sky making it. Or, when the great questions of "why?" and "how?" concerning our world began to plague the mind, the same brainpiece reached the same god conclusion.

It may have been evolutionarily useful at the time, but like male nipples, serves only to confuse, bewilder, and slow progress anymore. Nietzsche killed it.

Wait really? What a ridiculously misguided statement! Seriously, who is modding this up? Let`s take a quick look to see how inaccurate you are.

First off, let`s decide what sports to look at. I`ll go with the basketball and the NBA, MLB for baseball, and the NFL for football. I won't even count NHL hockey, and leave one of the biggest sports in the country NASCAR, off the board for a few reasons, A) I think you weren`t considering drivers athletes at all when making that claim, and B) them being termed athletes in the first place is a debatable claim.

So first off the NBA, let's look at the Season Racial and Gender Report Card 2006-2007

This states that 75% of NBA players are African-American, and during the 1994-95 season there was an all-time high of 82%. Hmm, not quite 90%+, but let`s look at other sports!

The MLB, which is notoriously losing it`s African-American makeup, had only 8.5% African-American players during the 2005 season! 2005 Race and Gender Report Card

Wow! 90%+ is there, but wait! It`s 90%+ NON-African-American players! And if you want to bring out Latinos and other races into the picture, 28.7% of players were Latino, and 2.5% were of Asian descent. Leaving over 50% of MLB players white! Not exactly one race being better at something than others now is it?

Finally we can move onto the NFL. Which in 2003 had a historic high of 69% African-American players. 2004 Race Report

So no not really 90%+ black players at all! In fact not even close in any of the major sports leagues in the United States. I`m reasonably sure the statistics are consistent for the top soccer leagues around the world, particularly, in Europe, such as the English Premiership and the Primera Liga in Spain. FIFA has made rules that these leagues require a minimum threshold of native players on the club teams so it`s less likely that the teams would consist of over 90% black players.

Seriously though I can`t believe the parent post was so blatantly incorrect and modded up like that. Do a little research or at least have SOME knowledge of what you are talking about before you go crazy. Christ, you could watch an hour of ESPN and see that the 90% figure is wrong.

Wait really? What a ridiculously misguided statement! Seriously, who is modding this up? Let`s take a quick look to see how inaccurate you are.

First off, let`s decide what sports to look at. I`ll go with the basketball and the NBA, MLB for baseball, and the NFL for football. I won't even count NHL hockey, and leave one of the biggest sports in the country NASCAR, off the board for a few reasons, A) I think you weren`t considering drivers athletes at all when making that claim, and B) them being termed athletes in the first place is a debatable claim.

So first off the NBA, let's look at the Season Racial and Gender Report Card 2006-2007

This states that 75% of NBA players are African-American, and during the 1994-95 season there was an all-time high of 82%. Hmm, not quite 90%+, but let`s look at other sports!

The MLB, which is notoriously losing it`s African-American makeup, had only 8.5% African-American players during the 2005 season! 2005 Race and Gender Report Card

Wow! 90%+ is there, but wait! It`s 90%+ NON-African-American players! And if you want to bring out Latinos and other races into the picture, 28.7% of players were Latino, and 2.5% were of Asian descent. Leaving over 50% of MLB players white! Not exactly one race being better at something than others now is it?

Finally we can move onto the NFL. Which in 2003 had a historic high of 69% African-American players. 2004 Race Report

So no not really 90%+ black players at all! In fact not even close in any of the major sports leagues in the United States. I`m reasonably sure the statistics are consistent for the top soccer leagues around the world, particularly, in Europe, such as the English Premiership and the Primera Liga in Spain. FIFA has made rules that these leagues require a minimum threshold of native players on the club teams so it`s less likely that the teams would consist of over 90% black players.

Seriously though I can`t believe the parent post was so blatantly incorrect and modded up like that. Do a little research or at least have SOME knowledge of what you are talking about before you go crazy. Christ, you could watch an hour of ESPN and see that the 90% figure is wrong.

Great. You can start by reducing Superflip to 19 moves.

And don't forget the 21" monitor.

That's achievable - eyeglass monitors or Head mounted displays

And a full keyboard and a mouse.

For flat surfaces:
http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/images/virtual-laser-keyboard-hand.jpg

Alternatively:
Senseboard - which doesn't project a keyboard at all
or

Lightweight eyetracker with any number of On screen keyboards

The original article isn't using holographic tech. Two-photon fluorescence spectroscopy used in the article is in a different non-linear optical process. Take a look:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_absorption
http://belfield.cos.ucf.edu/storage.html