Hah, he even got his depiction of neurons wrong
on
The Neuron Drive
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
His painting shows neurons as if they do not have synapses and are just one cohesive whole (that is so late 1800s). And then he has the nerve (bad pun I know) to label this under genius. What a douche.
PIC 16f877 Protoboard Wire Caps and resistors. IR-rangefinder by sharp Photoresistors 2 DC motors with gearbox/wheels Plexi, screws 20Mhz crystal 5-volt regulator 9-volt battery pack Pic programmer Free download of PIC assembly from Microchips website.
Done.
Re:soul of a new machine
on
Cube Farm
·
· Score: 1
Just finished reading it while I was at a conference. Yes, it did win a pulitizer prize. The book was very good in that it showed why an engineer goes through so much pain to get their project working. I found it more inspirational than depressing.
I saw her give a talk last week at the annual Society for Neuroscience convention in San Diego on this. It was cool stuff. She also had a demonstration where a video of a woman saying ga was dubbed with audio of the same woman saying ba. When you just listened to the audio you heard ba, but when you watched the video and listened you heard da, a sound that is inbetween ga and ba. It was a really cool illusion and showed how we integrate both visual and verbal ques into our understanding of speech.
I do research in a neurobiology lab and for one of our setups we water cool our camera. I just looked at it now (it is not my setup), it seems to run water from a nearby pipe into a specially made heatsink mounted to the back of the camera and then outagain towards another pipe.
are the ones who say they are not. They take their intelligence and creativity for granted. To them, they do not understand why everyone else cannot do what they do.
I wonder what a slashdotting would look like on a site using this for traffic analysis. It would be the equivalent of a natural disaster, like in sim city! I wonder if they would have an army feature like they did in sim city.
Ok, let me lay this down simply. If an experiment can be done in lab that shows that amino acids can self organize into proteins with the right reagents, then your point makes no sense. This is because the event does occur under early earth conditions! A protein is not just created by atoms coming together to form say hemoglobin. They atoms first come together to form amino acids. These have been synthesized under early earth conditions (without intelligent design!). The next step is for them to form proteins. This reaction also does not need an intelligent designer and happens because the functional groups on amino acids tend to react decently and form polymers. This is done all the time in labs, and is empirically sound. Thus, your point that it cannot happen by random interaction (in your universe, I guess God is needed to make crystals and minerals too right, since they are just as "improbable" from random interaction!) is not sound reasoning.
You do not back up your point at all. All you say is that it does not happen! Buddy, open an organic chemistry textbook or a biochemistry textbook and read it sometime. You will find that autogeneration of the building blocks for life is NOT improbable!
You are using "old-school" ideas of abiogenesis to back yourself up. In fact, it is not very hard for organic compounds to self-organize into the needed components of life. Take for instance the cell membrane, this is a sphere of phospholipids. If one just takes phospholipids and adds them in water, they self-organize into a sphere and provide a membrane. You may ask where these organic compounds came from, well a classic experiment (earned the researcher a Nobel prize I think) called the Miller-Urey experiment showed that if one simulated the conditions on a primordial earth, one got organic compounds (ranging from your simple alkanes to the building blocks of protiens, amino acids) were formed. And these processes happen relatively quickly, thus I do not see the evolution of life as being improbable. If any of my facts are wrong please correct, if you want back-up for my statements, feel free to request it.
"You agree to pay us three thousand dollars per unsolicited e-mail sent or telephone call and fifteen thousand dollars per e-mail address added to your commercial mailing list in violation of the foregoing, plus damages. "
I've just gotten off the phone with Rusty from kuro5hin dot org and he's got a proposal on the table for Wagner Consulting LLC., to come in and completely rewrite...
Actually, someone did just that. In the sandbox area of the game one can create any script without tax or monetary constraints. If you go to the website and look through the pictures one of the is of a giant dominoe setup in the sandbox area.
However pure sodium is not generally present in the natural environment. The only method I know of synthesizing it is by electrolysis with molten sodium chloride. However, I am sure there are other ways.
There is a great deal of redundancy built into the nervous system. There is also a great amount of plasticity, the best example being people who lose a limb. When the limb is lost, other areas in the motor cortex for other types of muscle control convert the now unused area (that was previously devoted to the lost limb) into control for other muscles. This is just one example of many, if you are more curious I recommend doing a google search for plasticity and nervous system.
They do have a form of control. It is called a null hypothesis and is the assumption that there is no correlation between the variables being compared (hence things like Chi-square test).
However, science is not just about hypothesis testing, it is also about observation.
Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting negative feedback loops ensue.
Hate to be nitpick (sp?), but that is a positive feedback loop.
Great idea. I work with neural networks in robotics and it is some of the coolest stuff around. Especially when they are giving answers that you did not expect, but which make sense.
Because it is fun!
One of my coworkers once asked me why I would reinvent the wheel, I was doing stuff in Lisp for autocad, and he said that he could proably find the same thing online. I told him that the challenge was fun, and along with that it allowed me to tailor the function to exactly what needed to be done.
Actually, I like to play around with robots. The reason I wanted to model a collection of neurons (or compartments), on a PIC chip was for a control system. But you are right, both Neuron and GENESIS are good programs for neural modeling. A problem I have with current neuroscience courses is that none of them seem to use these programs as a means to teach neurophysiology in a non-wetlab setting. The biggest benefit I have had from learning these programs is the ability to test what is described in the text books, something which other students are deprived of.
Oh man, where, I want that badly. I have been thinking of doing simulations of neurons (using a method called the Hodgkin Huxley model) which are very floating point operation intensive. Any links?
Slashdot Mirror
CAPITALIZE I!
His painting shows neurons as if they do not have synapses and are just one cohesive whole (that is so late 1800s). And then he has the nerve (bad pun I know) to label this under genius. What a douche.
PIC 16f877
Protoboard
Wire
Caps and resistors.
IR-rangefinder by sharp
Photoresistors
2 DC motors with gearbox/wheels
Plexi, screws
20Mhz crystal
5-volt regulator
9-volt battery pack
Pic programmer
Free download of PIC assembly from Microchips website.
Done.
Just finished reading it while I was at a conference. Yes, it did win a pulitizer prize. The book was very good in that it showed why an engineer goes through so much pain to get their project working. I found it more inspirational than depressing.
I saw her give a talk last week at the annual Society for Neuroscience convention in San Diego on this. It was cool stuff. She also had a demonstration where a video of a woman saying ga was dubbed with audio of the same woman saying ba. When you just listened to the audio you heard ba, but when you watched the video and listened you heard da, a sound that is inbetween ga and ba. It was a really cool illusion and showed how we integrate both visual and verbal ques into our understanding of speech.
If slackers no longer exist, then who is going to read slashdot?
I do research in a neurobiology lab and for one of our setups we water cool our camera. I just looked at it now (it is not my setup), it seems to run water from a nearby pipe into a specially made heatsink mounted to the back of the camera and then outagain towards another pipe.
are the ones who say they are not. They take their intelligence and creativity for granted. To them, they do not understand why everyone else cannot do what they do.
I wonder what a slashdotting would look like on a site using this for traffic analysis.
It would be the equivalent of a natural disaster, like in sim city! I wonder if they would have an army feature like they did in sim city.
Ok, let me lay this down simply. If an experiment can be done in lab that shows that amino acids can self organize into proteins with the right reagents, then your point makes no sense. This is because the event does occur under early earth conditions! A protein is not just created by atoms coming together to form say hemoglobin. They atoms first come together to form amino acids. These have been synthesized under early earth conditions (without intelligent design!). The next step is for them to form proteins. This reaction also does not need an intelligent designer and happens because the functional groups on amino acids tend to react decently and form polymers. This is done all the time in labs, and is empirically sound. Thus, your point that it cannot happen by random interaction (in your universe, I guess God is needed to make crystals and minerals too right, since they are just as "improbable" from random interaction!) is not sound reasoning.
You do not back up your point at all. All you say is that it does not happen! Buddy, open an organic chemistry textbook or a biochemistry textbook and read it sometime. You will find that autogeneration of the building blocks for life is NOT improbable!
You are using "old-school" ideas of abiogenesis to back yourself up. In fact, it is not very hard for organic compounds to self-organize into the needed components of life. Take for instance the cell membrane, this is a sphere of phospholipids. If one just takes phospholipids and adds them in water, they self-organize into a sphere and provide a membrane.
You may ask where these organic compounds came from, well a classic experiment (earned the researcher a Nobel prize I think) called the Miller-Urey experiment showed that if one simulated the conditions on a primordial earth, one got organic compounds (ranging from your simple alkanes to the building blocks of protiens, amino acids) were formed. And these processes happen relatively quickly, thus I do not see the evolution of life as being improbable.
If any of my facts are wrong please correct, if you want back-up for my statements, feel free to request it.
"You agree to pay us three thousand dollars per unsolicited e-mail sent or telephone call and fifteen thousand dollars per e-mail address added to your commercial mailing list in violation of the foregoing, plus damages. "
Not Anymore!
Actually, someone did just that. In the sandbox area of the game one can create any script without tax or monetary constraints. If you go to the website and look through the pictures one of the is of a giant dominoe setup in the sandbox area.
However pure sodium is not generally present in the natural environment. The only method I know of synthesizing it is by electrolysis with molten sodium chloride. However, I am sure there are other ways.
There is a great deal of redundancy built into the nervous system. There is also a great amount of plasticity, the best example being people who lose a limb. When the limb is lost, other areas in the motor cortex for other types of muscle control convert the now unused area (that was previously devoted to the lost limb) into control for other muscles. This is just one example of many, if you are more curious I recommend doing a google search for plasticity and nervous system.
They do have a form of control. It is called a null hypothesis and is the assumption that there is no correlation between the variables being compared (hence things like Chi-square test). However, science is not just about hypothesis testing, it is also about observation.
"You were s'posed to laugh!"
Quote from bottom of page when I accessed this thread.
Stress causes illnesses to last a lot longer. Interesting negative feedback loops ensue. Hate to be nitpick (sp?), but that is a positive feedback loop.
In that case I would go with robotics projects. Do a google search for pic microcontrollers and get some nifty sensors, let the fun begin!
Great idea. I work with neural networks in robotics and it is some of the coolest stuff around. Especially when they are giving answers that you did not expect, but which make sense.
Because it is fun! One of my coworkers once asked me why I would reinvent the wheel, I was doing stuff in Lisp for autocad, and he said that he could proably find the same thing online. I told him that the challenge was fun, and along with that it allowed me to tailor the function to exactly what needed to be done.
Actually, I like to play around with robots. The reason I wanted to model a collection of neurons (or compartments), on a PIC chip was for a control system. But you are right, both Neuron and GENESIS are good programs for neural modeling. A problem I have with current neuroscience courses is that none of them seem to use these programs as a means to teach neurophysiology in a non-wetlab setting. The biggest benefit I have had from learning these programs is the ability to test what is described in the text books, something which other students are deprived of.
Oh man, where, I want that badly. I have been thinking of doing simulations of neurons (using a method called the Hodgkin Huxley model) which are very floating point operation intensive. Any links?