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Technology Quarterly
LarsWestergren writes "There is an unusually interesting Technology Quarterly available for free from The Economist where they discuss some of the more interesting new areas in the area of science and technology. Of most interest to Slashdot might be Open source's local heroes, or perhaps playing Pac-Man on thought-controlled computers.
Among the other articles this month: Predicting microweather, transparent magnetic memories, smart robotic transplants, how to bake the perfect chip, and Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals."
Yikes. But towards a possible solution:
The Army reading list
ha! no need to type one-handed anymore! ;)
sorry.
How does one go about measuring this? It seems wildly inaccurate; either they're using a complex algorithm to model data creation, or they're taking a shot in the dark.
Because of the difficulty of estimating such figures, however, all of their numbers have wide margins of error.
I'll say! Give or take, say, five exabytes or so...
how to bake the perfect chip...
i have done that before, and its not that hard. all you do is start your system without realizing that the heatsink is every so slightly off the core from poor shipping...that bakes your chip nice and toasty.
incidentally, if you do bake your chip, it makes a pretty good gottee comb....yesh, sounds weird, but try it...
xao
xao
http://TheHillforum.hopto.org
"Benoit Mandelbrot - the father of fractals"
Hmmm...all his later work seems so similiar.
...Match this with the heads up display from the earlier article and the possibilities are endless. Imagine checking your email using nothing more than your glasses and your brain wave mouse! Where do I invest my pennies?
mate....eat....mate...eat.
One of the Economist's annual prizes for innovation went to Raymond Damadian for his role in creating NMR. But another fascinating article about who was responsible for creating NMR explains how Raymond Damadian missed out on the Nobel prize.
Read Epic the first RPG novel.
Let's build computers that can read our minds.
Okay, I'm getting my family and we're going up to the hills. I mean it this time. Who's with me?
It looks like a site for a lot of potential Slashdot topics...lol...
Maybe they're intentionally trying to get Slashdot readership?
In a recent subscriber survey they sent to me, I told them, "Whatever you do, don't follow Time, Newseek, et. al. and dumb yourself down to post-literate status. For the love of God please, please, please, don't ever put one of those ludicrous 'conventional wisdom' boxes in your publication."
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
This sounds rather interesting, but it seems it would apply to people who have already learned a task. Therefore, the neural connections would already be "connected" and trained.
But what about teaching somebody a new task using an EEG hat or such? You'd then use this device to find out how the brain learns. I mean, originally....the first bootstrap, so to speak.
I don't think it would be entriely useless to apply to learning new experiences either. Although your brain would draw on that which was previously learned, it would still be trying to absorb a wealth of new information.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
At least this seems to be moving in the direction of actual thought control rather than biofeedback. You'll know when you have real mind reading when the training time falls to 0 and people can use the interface to draw sketches.
Human Pacman
I thought that the headliner about Open Source software being easily translatable was particularly interesting. I've been trying to learn German through email (my pronunciation is horrible!) with my friend in Leipzig, while she works on her English.
We've both been using babelfish.altavista.com for the occasionaly translation help, but it often just causes confusion. Why is this? Wouldn't an Open-Source translation database with open API's be fairly easy to create?
Bear in mind that I'm not volunteering to start the project...I get yelled at for spending too much time with the computer and not enough with the girl as it is!!!
Why should I argue rationally with someone being irrational? I'll just mock them instead.
mmm... baked chips
i was at a demonstration recently about this.
it took like ~3-5mins to attach some 6 or so sensors(a the cap took some time first up front and then getting the contact good on all of them by wiggling). the biggest cap they had was 256 channel(also maximum for that system).
for demonstration i guess the most obvious things you could make out were the sensors related to eye movement. and the activation or something bump up in another test where the subject was shown pictures and told to press space bar everytime a motorcycle picture came up.
though, the enmg(?) was more fun, that's used to measure conduction in nerves(that they work, sometimes vital to know if nerves don't work or not when the patient is unconscious), it was more fun because of the shocking effect that could be used to shock your arm(so that you would swing your arm unwillingly, that would be fun in force feedback).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Benoit Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! Yes, he did coin the term, but his work built on the work of two men who have at least as much claim to the title of "father of fractals" as he does, and did their work before he did. As the article states, his work in the 1970s was based on the earlier work of Gaston Julia, a French-Algerian mathematician who described the fractal sets that now bear his name without the benefit of computers and won the Grand Prix de l'Academie des Sciences for his paper on the subject, entitled "Memoir sur l'iteration des fonctions rationnelles." Julia wrote that paper at age 25. Interesting side note on Julia: he lost his nose as a soldier in World War I and did mathematical research during an extended hospital stay due to that injury. He was eventually forced to wear a leather cover over the place where his nose had been, held in place with straps tied behind his head. Pictures of him are a bit strange because of that. :-b
Mandelbrodt came along in the 1970s, rediscovered the works of Julia, which had been all but forgotten, and used computers to do things like determine which Julia sets are connected and measure the Hausdorff Dimension of some fractal sets. He also coined the term "fractal." Contrary to what the article says, Mandelbrodt did not invent the concept of non-integral dimensions... given that the measure used is called the Hausdorff Dimension, does anyone want to guess who invented it? The answer is here.
Hausdorff, being a Jew, suffered and ultimately died during World War II. His work was deemed "Jewish" and "un-German" by the Nazis, and he lost his professor post at the University of Leipzig. In 1942, he, his wife, and his sister-in-law committed suicide when they couldn't escape being sent to a concentration camp.
Mandelbrodt did make significant contributions, especially to the visualization of fractals and the study of fractals and their properties on computers, but to call him the "father" is to ignore the contributions of the giants on whose shoulders he was standing (to borrow a famous phrase). Mandelbrodt is a good self-promoter, which should be obvious to anyone who RTFA. In the article, the familiarity of his work is compared to that of Newton and Einstein. While it never says his work is as important as the work of those two greats, it doesn't take a big mental leap to get to that idea. When Mandelbrodt discovered the set that now bears his name, he was smart enough not to give it that name himself. Instead he called it the "M set," leaving it to somebody else to add "andebrodt" to the name. Both of these things remind me of Hawking's A Brief History of Time, in which there are brief biographical blurbs of Newton, Einstein, and Hawking, in that order. I'd have loved to see Mandelbrodt and Hawking write a book together. It would be the battle royale for the title of biggest self-promoter in the sciences. I'm not saying they didn't make significant contributions (nor that Hawking's contributions aren't all the more amazing due to his debilitating disease), but this kind of self-promotion shouldn't be necessary. I wouldn't put Hawking or Mandelbrodt on my list of the top ten scientists and mathematicians of the 20th Century, but they would definitely make the list of the top ten best known.
A friend once told me a really nerdy joke that just came back to mind. He asked me if I knew which letter was most used in the English language. I told him I did-- it's "E." My friend said "that's correct, except in the work of Mandelbrodt, where the two most used are "I" and "M" (getting use from "me," "my," and "M," the name he gave the now-famous set).
I'm sad to report that I laughed as much at that one as I did at "assume a spherical cow." Damn, I'm nerdy.
I found the use of the phrase "under our noses" in the article a bit offensive, a slap in the face to Julia. Oops. Now I've done it too.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner
No more carpal tunnel syndrome...the managers will be pleased.
LIFT your left hand. Did you know that ... your mind knew which hand it was going to lift before you made the conscious decision to lift it. .....
Car manufacturers might even develop vehicles that integrate the driver's thoughts with the braking or steering system. In a crash, that half-second could be the difference between life and death.
So now, even before I realize I'm thinking about smashing into the car infront of me (because they keep jamming on their brakes for no reason) my car will do it? Road rage will take on new meaning.
"Honestly officer, it was the software...."
I had the same kind of idea a couple of years ago for a design project for school. I got the idea from a program I saw on Discovery, they were using the EEG as a lie detector kind of deal. I thought that was dumb and figured reading brain waves would be more useful for controlling things like a game :]. The equipment was a little to expensive for me and I was unable to secure a grant so I gave up on the idea, but not after doing a little research. I was pleased and jealous to read the article that someone was actually working on this. At least it clarifies some of my theories. The main problems I thought would be difficult to solve would be reading the small amplitudes of the beta brain waves, 5-50 mV (if I recall correctly), without that icky gel crap, filtering out any outside noise, deciphering the right brain signal (i.e. "move left"), adjusting the device to be able to read different persons brain signals (since everyone's brain is wired differently), and moving all this stuff off the "baseball cap" so it doesn't weigh 50 lbs. I had thought the hardest would be creating software to read the brain signals and to adjust to different people, but I guess they solved that. I had also thought of another side effect that I'm sure they must have thought of. If one was able to correctly read a persons brain signals, would it not be possible to reverse the process and send signals to the person?
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned this yet, but the OpenEEG project over at:
;).
http://openeeg.sf.net/
is an attempt to give all us geeks the chance to experiment with mind interfaces.
I want my commercial cheap-and-easy-to-use 128 node EEG machine, though. That would rock
Opinions stated are mine and do not reflect those of the Illuminati
Bonus tidbit: Mandelbrot's name means "almond bread" in German.
I'm really not sure why I was insisting on inserting an extra "d" before the "t" in his name last night. I'd love to say I did it on purpose because a lower-case "d" is often used for the Hausdorff dimension, but I'd prefer not to lie.
--Mark
"It is nice to know that the computer understands the problem. But I would like to understand it too." --Eugene Wigner