finally, a brain prosthesis. i know so many that this could help. starting with the person who took their time to scroll all the way down and read this post.
Kind of the way the IT department operates when they lay off the staff, who installed the system and kept it running for 10 years, with a bunch of fresh-out-of-college grads and a few H1-b's.
Statistical analysis only works on linear systems. You have to know that every unique input will yield the same output.
What gets the average Joe into trouble is the fact the very few systems in this world are linear, and those that are assume that its working in a very specific environment. The feed us all of these contrived examples in school, and people graduate expecting the world to behave according to the rules of algebra. Well, it doesn't.
As it turns out, what we learn in physics really only applies to life in or present frame of reference, under earth's gravity. The reactions in Chem only work at Standard Temperature and Pressure. (Hell, just note that cooking directions change at high altitudes.)
We are so bent on making to world so simple that we forget to actually see it for what it is some times.
That said, if you happen to come up with a decent working model for economics...
Utilizing these technologies, implants would be placed in the brain which connect it to the Internet through all the wireless technologies present, satellites, etc.
Not until we can design algorythems to process information in the frequency domain. Right now we can translate information INTO the frequency domain, but the rules of logic are quite different.
So, that's the first thing I thought of when I saw this story. Once we can perfectly replicate the functionality of every last bit of the brain, do we just have a really nifty toy, or a genuine mind?
We are actually mixing a few concepts together here. The Mind in the classical definition is the pile of a zillion rules and reflexes we live by. The Conciousness is something entirely different, and the best definitions are incomplete at best.
If you are talking about replacing a chunk of the mind, a computerized part is equivilent to a biological part (or at least a bio part in diminished capacity.)
Now it is a BIG assumption that "the conciousness" is in fact a functioning part of the operation. I've always suspected conciousness is a bit like CNN. It THINKS it's making the news, but really it's just reporting it after some delay and only in short blips at a time, usually at the expense of other events.
Most parts of the mind goes about its existance regardless of what the conciousness thinks. Studies have shown that people often start reacting to stimulis even before they are "aware" of the stimulis.
For my $0.02 conciousness works like a Fourier Transform, generating a big picture by transforming time signals into the frequency domain for analysis. There is a delay, generally, in FFT, which is probably that 1 second delay (think driver's ed reaction time) between a signal and the "Oh my".
If that is the case, the mechanical part would not really affect this process. Well, at least no more than any other brain modification or injury.
We just mimicked a relatively simple part of the brain with an exhaustive, brute-force approach that may not scale well to human hippocampi.
Shannon's Information theory basically boils down to: you only have to store/transmit the bits of information that don't do what you expect them to do. If you are shipping a stream of all 1's, the compression algorythem is a simple infinite loop.
When you perform a logic table or a K-map you are actually using a rudimentary compression algorythem to simplify the response to input. Something like a huffman code is simply a more complex compression algorythem.
If the stimulis-response pattern is that whacked out, that means there is a heck of a lot more to meatware than folks give it credit. I personally wonder if they might be simplifying matters a bit by assuming the system ALWAYS responds the same way to the same inputs, or whether an internal state affects the behavior. Rather hard to tell that on dead tissue.
So lets say they get this working. Would it then be possible to record every moment of your life and store it away?
I can't help but think of the movie "Brain-Storm."
It was an early 80s movie with Christopher Walkin. In it a company invented a way to record memories for playback. Everything is hunky dory until one of the lab techs has a heart attack with the thing on, and records the whole process of dieing.
I've lifted a pretty good explaination from the book The Holograpic Universe, by Michael Talbot[amazon.com]. Memories are stored like holographic interference patterns within the mind. In holography, if you chop the image in half you actually get 2 copies of the image, albeit at half the resolution. The image is only retrieved when you shine a reference beam over the interfence pattern.
Now, if the hippocampus is responsible for encoding the reference beam for memory storage and retrieval, you would still need the original brain matter, or at least a good chunk of it, to pull up the memory. It would be like having a FAT table, but none of the data sectors.
While this wouldn't make a good memory archiving tool, it would make a dandy interrogation tool. Simply subject your subject to a standard battery of waveforms and record how the brain responds.
Before I discount the idea completely, I should not the work of Carl Jung. According to Jung, humans have a standard set of hard-coded symbols. He has a pretty substantial body of work that is beyond the scope of this rant. Now if his theories are correct, it may be possible that we all react in a similar way to the same waveform patterns. With a large enough cross sampling of the frequency response of neural matter you might be able to construct a lookup table.
A lot of the work folks have done with PET scanners shows that many people DO use the same part of the brain for similar tasks. You might be on to something, at least for folks with a normal mind. The psychotic are known to respond VERY differently to stimuli, which is why tests like word-association work so well in identifying them.
I will never forget an experience I had programming a leg mind-storm to navigate the room. The algorythem was a simple tap the bumper, back up and turn system I've been using since my college days on the MIT handybot.
This time however, I decided to randomize the timings. Rather than have a set amount of time to back up, and a set amount of turning, I randomized the interval of time for both. I turned it loose and found it god itself stuck a lot less often.
For giggles I packed it up and lugged it over my mom's place. She had gotten me the bot for my birthday and I wanted to show her some of the nifty things I was doing. Her first impression was that I had programmed some sort of intelligence into it. To her the movements were so lifelike. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was a simple algorythem with a random number generator.
Now that begs the question. Is there some random element that makes us human? Do our neurons simply channel random chance into a somewhat repeatable array of behaviors?
As a side note, ever since then rather than rack my brain over dinner choices, or what to have in my coffee, I've started picking selections at random, or flipping a coin. I generally find I like the randomized selection better.
And that explosive, gaseous and high pressure gas delivers a HELL of a lot more bang for your buck.
Given my druthers, I would recommend propane instead. It liquifies at low pressure for safe and easy transport, it is easily synthesized, AND a lot of equipment is already geared to run it. Did I mention it also delivers a LOT more bang for the buck than hydrogen. Carbon bonds contain a lot more energy than hydrogen bonds.
YES you still have the C02 problem, but then again, so to the operators of the vehicle.
Actually, with an forced induction charging system the charge time is 15 minutes for a car. There is also the idea of swapping your dead battery for a fresh one like you do with propane tanks.
...Parking lots a) usually don't have electricity...
Then what is powering the bloody floodlights?
...Parking lots b)... aren't equipped to collect money from drivers who charge their cars...
Nope, but at least around here they are sure equipped to collect money from the people who park there. I live downtown, mind you. Given what they charge for just occupying space, I think the notion of ALSO charging you for a commodity item like electricity would give most lot owners a woody.
I've actually had moderate success with an electric scooter[zapworld.com]. The nice part about that one is that while it is slower than a bike, I can fold it up an take it with me as opposed to chaining it up outside. It is also small enough to ride with me on the subway or the regional rail, greatly extending the range.
At $600 5 years ago, it paid for itself in gas and parking withing 6 month.
The thing is a bit old, and since moving within a block of the office I haven't used it in almost 2 years. But we are moving across town, so out it will come again. I'm tempted to find a lighter battery for it, though. The lead-acid battery is probably shot by now. Plus the think wieghs 35 pounds. While I can lug it, the wife has trouble.
The games market, unlike the music market, is pretty much a national game at the lowest level anyway, which means there's a huge barrier to entry for indies.
I don't know. Have you ever considered calling up the local Game Spot or EB and ask them to stock your game? There are also local book stores, museums, etc that all have one person you can contact to get stocked.
The gaming market is not national. Last I checked it is purchased one copy at a time. A CDR costs $1 to make, and a case can be printed up for another $1. The rest is hard work and hustle, which seems to be out of fashion.
I think the real barrier for innovation is the fact that nobody wants to do the REAL work required to make a product sell.
Here's the rub. We complain about a lack of innovation in gaming with the same breath we decry how buggy it is, and how crappy the UI design may be.
Face it, games are going to have to be "repetitive" because people expect virtual perfection for them. Also, most companies no longer have the will or desire to build a brand new (fill in the blank) engine. They just license the parts and build their story. To do otherwise would be like inventing a new language before you wrote a novel.
I do not buy this crap for a minute that big industry is in the process of "Hollywoodizing" the game industry. Granted Sony, Nintendo, M$, et.all seem to have a lock on the console market. That would be because the DESIGNED a lock into the console. The computer game market is still WIDE open though, as is the Cell Phone/PDA market.
PC and PDAs are general purpose computers. Open Source has, in the past, created immense libraries to handle everything from databases to boot prompts. There is nothing blocking someone from taking up the cause for game engines. Well, except for the fact that everyone expects to make a zillion dollars from the endeavor.
Linus did not start coding Linux in the hopes of raking in mad cash. RMS has never had any illusions of monetary gain. We need someone to start a similar project for games, but in the tradition of the great open-source projects, not quit his/her day job and do it on the side.
The wash-and-fold normally charges $30 to dig through my dirty laundry if that's any measure of how undesirable it is.
Frankly if I had any illusions of privacy they were squashed into Delusional McNuggets(tm) after applying for a mortgage. I know EXACTLY how boring I am after that.
...And more generally, ultimately it's wasted effort, since eventually wifi/OpenSpectrum will be more ubiquitous...
I look forward to that day. But while a DSL line runs $50+/month shop owners are going to want to make sure that the people who use it at least have to go to the counter and buy something. And nothing is worse for a coffee shop's atmosphere than to have it full of people (fat or thin) whose only sign of life is when the LCD backlight reflected off their face changes colors.
She is trying to cater to the daytime laptop crowd. She has noticed that everyone and their maiden aunt Sue seem to be lugging laptops around.
At night (after 8 or so) on the other hand, the place is packed, so the last thing she wants is for the place to turn into an anti-social everyone behind a screen type of place. She is trying to find a balance between making technology convienent and having it completely change the character of her establishment.
The software by the way runs under the Tclhttpd, MySQL, and a few watchdog scripts in the crontab.
The webserver modifies the MySQL database, and the changes are picked up by a monitor daemon that passes commands to iptables. Everyone in the store gets an RFC1918 address, and (if they are paid up) they can route to the internet using IP Masquerading. Since the software runs as a website, the counter person just logs onto the "gateway", and sees a list of who is plugged into the network (information I sift from the dhcp leases.) From there he/she can activate or deactivate connections manually. By default an activated connection will be programmed to time out after a set period of time, enforced by a cron job that checks every 5 minutes or so.
Patrons can look at the same website and see how long they have left, and the menu.
I'm playing with the new(er) toys in the kernel that let you filter by MAC number. Failing that I'll just pull the mac numbers out of the DHCP leases, pair them with an IP address, and filter on that.
Naturally, since I'm building on GPL code, I will be releasing the source when it's finished on my website (http://www.etoyoc.com).
I remember when stories like this were science fiction fodder.
People, we live in a new world. The same technology that allows us to expose the dirty laundry inside of corrupt organizations can also be used to expose and dirty laundry in your hamper.
The rules of the game have changed. You can no longer sit back and wonder if someone can see what you are doing, good or bad. They either can observe your actions directly, or they can retrieve the records to reconstruct the event. Political parties now have databases of everything someone has said in public, and can quickly cross reference even the most obscure quote. Sportscaster have massive databases of player statistics and can call up on a whim every dropped ball or missed catch.
What begs the question in my mind, is what are the rules of courtesy? When do you draw the line between what can be retrieved and what should be retreived. Too many people assume that just because you can do something you are compelled to do it. That is a fallicy that was first recognized by the greeks.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it should also play "Daisy, Daisy" when exposed to an iSeries or a zSeries mainframe.
I resemble that remark.
Kind of the way the IT department operates when they lay off the staff, who installed the system and kept it running for 10 years, with a bunch of fresh-out-of-college grads and a few H1-b's.
Badly.
What gets the average Joe into trouble is the fact the very few systems in this world are linear, and those that are assume that its working in a very specific environment. The feed us all of these contrived examples in school, and people graduate expecting the world to behave according to the rules of algebra. Well, it doesn't.
As it turns out, what we learn in physics really only applies to life in or present frame of reference, under earth's gravity. The reactions in Chem only work at Standard Temperature and Pressure. (Hell, just note that cooking directions change at high altitudes.)
We are so bent on making to world so simple that we forget to actually see it for what it is some times.
That said, if you happen to come up with a decent working model for economics...
You are my hero.
I knew human experience was not that easy to compress. Er. Well, something in me knows that, but I don't have a memory of why.
Hey, and the Soviet Russia jokes would be so funny each time. Hey, where does this link to goat.se.cx go?
Not until we can design algorythems to process information in the frequency domain. Right now we can translate information INTO the frequency domain, but the rules of logic are quite different.
We are actually mixing a few concepts together here. The Mind in the classical definition is the pile of a zillion rules and reflexes we live by. The Conciousness is something entirely different, and the best definitions are incomplete at best.
If you are talking about replacing a chunk of the mind, a computerized part is equivilent to a biological part (or at least a bio part in diminished capacity.)
Now it is a BIG assumption that "the conciousness" is in fact a functioning part of the operation. I've always suspected conciousness is a bit like CNN. It THINKS it's making the news, but really it's just reporting it after some delay and only in short blips at a time, usually at the expense of other events.
Most parts of the mind goes about its existance regardless of what the conciousness thinks. Studies have shown that people often start reacting to stimulis even before they are "aware" of the stimulis.
For my $0.02 conciousness works like a Fourier Transform, generating a big picture by transforming time signals into the frequency domain for analysis. There is a delay, generally, in FFT, which is probably that 1 second delay (think driver's ed reaction time) between a signal and the "Oh my".
If that is the case, the mechanical part would not really affect this process. Well, at least no more than any other brain modification or injury.
Shannon's Information theory basically boils down to: you only have to store/transmit the bits of information that don't do what you expect them to do. If you are shipping a stream of all 1's, the compression algorythem is a simple infinite loop.
When you perform a logic table or a K-map you are actually using a rudimentary compression algorythem to simplify the response to input. Something like a huffman code is simply a more complex compression algorythem.
If the stimulis-response pattern is that whacked out, that means there is a heck of a lot more to meatware than folks give it credit. I personally wonder if they might be simplifying matters a bit by assuming the system ALWAYS responds the same way to the same inputs, or whether an internal state affects the behavior. Rather hard to tell that on dead tissue.
No, but neither does he.
I can't help but think of the movie "Brain-Storm."
It was an early 80s movie with Christopher Walkin. In it a company invented a way to record memories for playback. Everything is hunky dory until one of the lab techs has a heart attack with the thing on, and records the whole process of dieing.
I've lifted a pretty good explaination from the book The Holograpic Universe, by Michael Talbot[amazon.com]. Memories are stored like holographic interference patterns within the mind. In holography, if you chop the image in half you actually get 2 copies of the image, albeit at half the resolution. The image is only retrieved when you shine a reference beam over the interfence pattern.
Now, if the hippocampus is responsible for encoding the reference beam for memory storage and retrieval, you would still need the original brain matter, or at least a good chunk of it, to pull up the memory. It would be like having a FAT table, but none of the data sectors.
While this wouldn't make a good memory archiving tool, it would make a dandy interrogation tool. Simply subject your subject to a standard battery of waveforms and record how the brain responds.
Before I discount the idea completely, I should not the work of Carl Jung. According to Jung, humans have a standard set of hard-coded symbols. He has a pretty substantial body of work that is beyond the scope of this rant. Now if his theories are correct, it may be possible that we all react in a similar way to the same waveform patterns. With a large enough cross sampling of the frequency response of neural matter you might be able to construct a lookup table.
A lot of the work folks have done with PET scanners shows that many people DO use the same part of the brain for similar tasks. You might be on to something, at least for folks with a normal mind. The psychotic are known to respond VERY differently to stimuli, which is why tests like word-association work so well in identifying them.
This time however, I decided to randomize the timings. Rather than have a set amount of time to back up, and a set amount of turning, I randomized the interval of time for both. I turned it loose and found it god itself stuck a lot less often.
For giggles I packed it up and lugged it over my mom's place. She had gotten me the bot for my birthday and I wanted to show her some of the nifty things I was doing. Her first impression was that I had programmed some sort of intelligence into it. To her the movements were so lifelike. I didn't have the heart to tell her it was a simple algorythem with a random number generator.
Now that begs the question. Is there some random element that makes us human? Do our neurons simply channel random chance into a somewhat repeatable array of behaviors?
As a side note, ever since then rather than rack my brain over dinner choices, or what to have in my coffee, I've started picking selections at random, or flipping a coin. I generally find I like the randomized selection better.
Good stuff to know.
Given my druthers, I would recommend propane instead. It liquifies at low pressure for safe and easy transport, it is easily synthesized, AND a lot of equipment is already geared to run it. Did I mention it also delivers a LOT more bang for the buck than hydrogen. Carbon bonds contain a lot more energy than hydrogen bonds.
YES you still have the C02 problem, but then again, so to the operators of the vehicle.
Actually, with an forced induction charging system the charge time is 15 minutes for a car. There is also the idea of swapping your dead battery for a fresh one like you do with propane tanks.
Then what is powering the bloody floodlights?
Nope, but at least around here they are sure equipped to collect money from the people who park there. I live downtown, mind you. Given what they charge for just occupying space, I think the notion of ALSO charging you for a commodity item like electricity would give most lot owners a woody.
At $600 5 years ago, it paid for itself in gas and parking withing 6 month.
The thing is a bit old, and since moving within a block of the office I haven't used it in almost 2 years. But we are moving across town, so out it will come again. I'm tempted to find a lighter battery for it, though. The lead-acid battery is probably shot by now. Plus the think wieghs 35 pounds. While I can lug it, the wife has trouble.
Filling stations already have electricity running to them. What's the distribution problem?
I don't know. Have you ever considered calling up the local Game Spot or EB and ask them to stock your game? There are also local book stores, museums, etc that all have one person you can contact to get stocked.
The gaming market is not national. Last I checked it is purchased one copy at a time. A CDR costs $1 to make, and a case can be printed up for another $1. The rest is hard work and hustle, which seems to be out of fashion.
I think the real barrier for innovation is the fact that nobody wants to do the REAL work required to make a product sell.
Face it, games are going to have to be "repetitive" because people expect virtual perfection for them. Also, most companies no longer have the will or desire to build a brand new (fill in the blank) engine. They just license the parts and build their story. To do otherwise would be like inventing a new language before you wrote a novel.
I do not buy this crap for a minute that big industry is in the process of "Hollywoodizing" the game industry. Granted Sony, Nintendo, M$, et.all seem to have a lock on the console market. That would be because the DESIGNED a lock into the console. The computer game market is still WIDE open though, as is the Cell Phone/PDA market.
PC and PDAs are general purpose computers. Open Source has, in the past, created immense libraries to handle everything from databases to boot prompts. There is nothing blocking someone from taking up the cause for game engines. Well, except for the fact that everyone expects to make a zillion dollars from the endeavor.
Linus did not start coding Linux in the hopes of raking in mad cash. RMS has never had any illusions of monetary gain. We need someone to start a similar project for games, but in the tradition of the great open-source projects, not quit his/her day job and do it on the side.
It takes years, yes, but look at the results.
Frankly if I had any illusions of privacy they were squashed into Delusional McNuggets(tm) after applying for a mortgage. I know EXACTLY how boring I am after that.
I look forward to that day. But while a DSL line runs $50+/month shop owners are going to want to make sure that the people who use it at least have to go to the counter and buy something. And nothing is worse for a coffee shop's atmosphere than to have it full of people (fat or thin) whose only sign of life is when the LCD backlight reflected off their face changes colors.
At night (after 8 or so) on the other hand, the place is packed, so the last thing she wants is for the place to turn into an anti-social everyone behind a screen type of place. She is trying to find a balance between making technology convienent and having it completely change the character of her establishment.
The software by the way runs under the Tclhttpd, MySQL, and a few watchdog scripts in the crontab.
The webserver modifies the MySQL database, and the changes are picked up by a monitor daemon that passes commands to iptables. Everyone in the store gets an RFC1918 address, and (if they are paid up) they can route to the internet using IP Masquerading. Since the software runs as a website, the counter person just logs onto the "gateway", and sees a list of who is plugged into the network (information I sift from the dhcp leases.) From there he/she can activate or deactivate connections manually. By default an activated connection will be programmed to time out after a set period of time, enforced by a cron job that checks every 5 minutes or so.
Patrons can look at the same website and see how long they have left, and the menu.
I'm playing with the new(er) toys in the kernel that let you filter by MAC number. Failing that I'll just pull the mac numbers out of the DHCP leases, pair them with an IP address, and filter on that.
Naturally, since I'm building on GPL code, I will be releasing the source when it's finished on my website (http://www.etoyoc.com).
The shop is the Crimson Moon Coffee House, 20th and Sansom. I am still in negotiations with them, but ETA is about a month from now.
People, we live in a new world. The same technology that allows us to expose the dirty laundry inside of corrupt organizations can also be used to expose and dirty laundry in your hamper.
The rules of the game have changed. You can no longer sit back and wonder if someone can see what you are doing, good or bad. They either can observe your actions directly, or they can retrieve the records to reconstruct the event. Political parties now have databases of everything someone has said in public, and can quickly cross reference even the most obscure quote. Sportscaster have massive databases of player statistics and can call up on a whim every dropped ball or missed catch.
What begs the question in my mind, is what are the rules of courtesy? When do you draw the line between what can be retrieved and what should be retreived. Too many people assume that just because you can do something you are compelled to do it. That is a fallicy that was first recognized by the greeks.