Modern high speed CPUs are dynamic nMOS silicon, with P channel devices sprinkled around for recharging nodes, etc., but not in the signal path. P channel MOSFETS are about 3 times weaker than N channel in silicon, resulting in CMOS being 1/4 the speed of dynamic nMOS. There's a reason that Intel specifies a minimum clock rate on their CPUs, dynamic circuits lose their charge and malfunction below the minimum clock rate..
Actual sustained firing rates don't exceed 10/sec. At 100/sec, a neuron risks poisoning itself with waste products.
Your "100 billion independent processing units" are single bit units, in no way equivalent to a CPU, or even an integer math unit.
Just those 2 considerations means reducing your estimate by a factor of 300, from 10 teraflops/s to 300 gigaflops/s. (not far from the power-limited consideration I made a few paragraphs above, 156 gigaflops/s). Power7 with 8 cores can peak close to 800 gigaflops/s, although while consuming much more power.
Energy use puts one cap on brain processing. A single neuron firing requires at the very least 4x10^-12 Joules. http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v21/n10/full/9591146a.html At a brain power of 20 watts, that's 5 trillion firings per second, each firing equivalent to the state-change of a single flipflop feeding 1000 gates. That's ignoring standby/idle power dissipation.
A single firing doesn't mean much. A floating point number is 32 bits, requiring 32 flipflops (neurons). 5e12 / 32 = 156e9 flops/s, i.e. 156 Gflop/s. A very impressive number, if the brain were actually optimized to do floating point math, and didn't have to do anything else. But that's nowhere near 100 trillion.
There are obvious fallacies in the brain calculation. One is that nowhere near all neurons are active at once: the brain has specialized components most of which are inactive at any given moment, and memory is a big, low access rate component. Another is that "100 billion neurons...each sending signals to 1000 other neurons" is implying that there's something meaningful happening in 100 trillion places at once, which is just laughable.
Let's say, for instance, that you can recognize 10,000 songs, and mostly follow along with the tune and think of the words before they're sung. When you're listening to one song, you might relate to snippets of another 10 songs. Your brain inactivity index for songs is thus 99.9%, and for many other activities at the same time it will be even closer to 100%. All of the time, most of the brain is inactive.
taxing commerce gives the government incentive to encourage commerce.
This is at best a half-truth, and makes the silly assumption that the government would act rationally. Cigarette taxes are very high to discourage the use of cigarettes (and to rip off consumers.) Greenies promote high gasoline taxes to discourage diving gas-powered cars. Imported goods are taxed to discourage foreign goods (and encourage untaxed domestic producers.)
It's a Laffer Curve phenomenon, not that there's much recognition of that when such taxes are being proposed.
Re:Brought to you by the same government
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Fedcoin Rising?
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Remember Sturgeon's Law? "Ninety percent of everything is crap." How nicely it fits with your chosen percentage for the minds of those who disagree with liberty.
Inflation favors a number of things, among which are the purchase of more stable currencies, malinvestment, and the purchase of anything that allows the purchaser to get out of his declining asset. When/if the inflation ends, investors will sell their "investments" to use their assets in a more desired fashion, and supply/demand destroys the price of the investment. Since the last person out loses everything, this encourages very rapid selling at the first hint of a downturn. That's volatility, and volatility discourages industry.
Inflation is a sure sign that the government is dishonest, and a dishonest government is never a good thing. Inflation severely damages the ability to plan for the future, which discourages business risk-taking and the incentive to work. (Why should I work if my money becomes worthless?)
I think this research should be scrapped immediately and banned by the UN.
entirely new types of thought
Experimenting with this type of evolutionary behavior is not ethical.
Is there an Encyclopedia of Stupidity that you're studying, Anonymous Coward? Must be, you think the U.N. is an organization with moral authority and an ability to force things to happen without the backing of the U.S.A.
Dogs are pack hunters and social animals. They submit to the leader of the pack. For domestic dogs, their owner is an ersatz pack leader. Saying that "Dogs are genetically disposed to imprint on their owners" is subtly inaccurate.
Now imagine Manhattan, with 2 million horses producing a total of 60 million pounds of manure a day, 22 billion pounds of manure a year. Think of walking across the East River on the sludge thus accumulated. And Oh, the lovely odor. London would be far worse, the Thames hardly flows in comparison.
WESTERN civilization is the only bad one? The horrors imposed by the politically powerful are well-nigh universal, and currently the West is far more benevolent than Cuba, Venezuela, much of Africa, and anywhere that Islam is officially in control.
35mm motion picture film is usually shot across the short axis, which means a width of 24mm. 6000/24 = 250, or 125 cycles per mm. Lenses that can achieve that with a decent MTF across the whole frame run about $30,000, if they exist at all. IMAX is talking about the theoretical limitation of the film itself, and probably not even that, since high resolution color film, at least for consumers, is no longer manufactured.
It gets worse. IMAX is abusing the technical term "depth of field" to imply some sort of image quality, whereas depth of field is actually worse in direct proportion to the lens aperture (which in turn is directly proportional to the film size for a given field of view and level of illumination at the film plane.)
IMAX provides great quality, but the explanation is BS.
I am currently sitting 20" away from a 30" monitor and could easily take advantage of a bigger screen with more resolution. Detail sometimes matters. How far from your face do you hold a book?
Still images require greater resolution than movies for the same level of visual satisfaction.
Early laser printers had 300 dpi, which was visibly inferior to printed material. That's 2550 pixels across a letter-size sheet of paper. Can you honestly say there's no use for having three sheets of paper visible at once?
Some manufacturers are making Adobe 1998 RGB monitors. Even wider gamut is technically possible, but requires engineering compromises like narrow-bandwidth filters which are less efficient, or expensive options like more than 3 channels of LED backlights, or laser backlights, etc.. Sharp did introduce a 4-color TV, has this given them any market advantage?
High brightness is of little use indoors, and is a disadvantage for motion picture display because it requires a higher framerate. Tom's Hardware considers brightness over the 200 nits they test at to be excessive.
It takes over $2000 just to process an 8 inch wafer, from which you'd get just one 4x5 sensor almost guaranteed to be defective. This is not a practical basis for anything but extreme niche applications.
Compact cameras are marvels. My $130 Canon A1100IS has about 75% of the resolution of a mid-range 35mm camera with mid-speed film. It's likelier to produce a usable image because of image stabilization and because a smaller lens means greater depth of field.
Fixing the problems caused by the Bayer pattern sensor is an ongoing challenge. The problem is getting the last bit of detail from an image without introducing false color. There have been improvements in recent years, and I'd guess we're pretty close to the limit of what's possible.
Camera manufacturers actually intentionally blur the image slightly before it gets to the sensor to reduce the problem of light either producing false colors or "falling in the cracks."
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Modern high speed CPUs are dynamic nMOS silicon, with P channel devices sprinkled around for recharging nodes, etc., but not in the signal path. P channel MOSFETS are about 3 times weaker than N channel in silicon, resulting in CMOS being 1/4 the speed of dynamic nMOS. There's a reason that Intel specifies a minimum clock rate on their CPUs, dynamic circuits lose their charge and malfunction below the minimum clock rate..
Actual sustained firing rates don't exceed 10/sec. At 100/sec, a neuron risks poisoning itself with waste products.
Your "100 billion independent processing units" are single bit units, in no way equivalent to a CPU, or even an integer math unit.
Just those 2 considerations means reducing your estimate by a factor of 300, from 10 teraflops/s to 300 gigaflops/s. (not far from the power-limited consideration I made a few paragraphs above, 156 gigaflops/s). Power7 with 8 cores can peak close to 800 gigaflops/s, although while consuming much more power.
Energy use puts one cap on brain processing. A single neuron firing requires at the very least 4x10^-12 Joules. http://www.nature.com/jcbfm/journal/v21/n10/full/9591146a.html At a brain power of 20 watts, that's 5 trillion firings per second, each firing equivalent to the state-change of a single flipflop feeding 1000 gates. That's ignoring standby/idle power dissipation.
A single firing doesn't mean much. A floating point number is 32 bits, requiring 32 flipflops (neurons). 5e12 / 32 = 156e9 flops/s, i.e. 156 Gflop/s. A very impressive number, if the brain were actually optimized to do floating point math, and didn't have to do anything else. But that's nowhere near 100 trillion.
There are obvious fallacies in the brain calculation. One is that nowhere near all neurons are active at once: the brain has specialized components most of which are inactive at any given moment, and memory is a big, low access rate component. Another is that "100 billion neurons...each sending signals to 1000 other neurons" is implying that there's something meaningful happening in 100 trillion places at once, which is just laughable.
Let's say, for instance, that you can recognize 10,000 songs, and mostly follow along with the tune and think of the words before they're sung. When you're listening to one song, you might relate to snippets of another 10 songs. Your brain inactivity index for songs is thus 99.9%, and for many other activities at the same time it will be even closer to 100%. All of the time, most of the brain is inactive.
This is at best a half-truth, and makes the silly assumption that the government would act rationally. Cigarette taxes are very high to discourage the use of cigarettes (and to rip off consumers.) Greenies promote high gasoline taxes to discourage diving gas-powered cars. Imported goods are taxed to discourage foreign goods (and encourage untaxed domestic producers.)
It's a Laffer Curve phenomenon, not that there's much recognition of that when such taxes are being proposed.
Remember Sturgeon's Law? "Ninety percent of everything is crap." How nicely it fits with your chosen percentage for the minds of those who disagree with liberty.
Inflation favors a number of things, among which are the purchase of more stable currencies, malinvestment, and the purchase of anything that allows the purchaser to get out of his declining asset. When/if the inflation ends, investors will sell their "investments" to use their assets in a more desired fashion, and supply/demand destroys the price of the investment. Since the last person out loses everything, this encourages very rapid selling at the first hint of a downturn. That's volatility, and volatility discourages industry.
Inflation is a sure sign that the government is dishonest, and a dishonest government is never a good thing. Inflation severely damages the ability to plan for the future, which discourages business risk-taking and the incentive to work. (Why should I work if my money becomes worthless?)
Is there an Encyclopedia of Stupidity that you're studying, Anonymous Coward? Must be, you think the U.N. is an organization with moral authority and an ability to force things to happen without the backing of the U.S.A.
Dogs are pack hunters and social animals. They submit to the leader of the pack. For domestic dogs, their owner is an ersatz pack leader. Saying that "Dogs are genetically disposed to imprint on their owners" is subtly inaccurate.
Now imagine Manhattan, with 2 million horses producing a total of 60 million pounds of manure a day, 22 billion pounds of manure a year. Think of walking across the East River on the sludge thus accumulated. And Oh, the lovely odor. London would be far worse, the Thames hardly flows in comparison.
If we can force genetics to make bigger brained people, we can force more of the growth to occur after birth. Think outside the box.
Macroscopic animals need to act in their own interest to continue existing. Robots can be turned off for years at a time and suffer no harm.
WESTERN civilization is the only bad one? The horrors imposed by the politically powerful are well-nigh universal, and currently the West is far more benevolent than Cuba, Venezuela, much of Africa, and anywhere that Islam is officially in control.
More likely you'll end up with smarter terrorists, which is not a good thing.
35mm motion picture film is usually shot across the short axis, which means a width of 24mm. 6000/24 = 250, or 125 cycles per mm. Lenses that can achieve that with a decent MTF across the whole frame run about $30,000, if they exist at all. IMAX is talking about the theoretical limitation of the film itself, and probably not even that, since high resolution color film, at least for consumers, is no longer manufactured.
It gets worse. IMAX is abusing the technical term "depth of field" to imply some sort of image quality, whereas depth of field is actually worse in direct proportion to the lens aperture (which in turn is directly proportional to the film size for a given field of view and level of illumination at the film plane.)
IMAX provides great quality, but the explanation is BS.
I am currently sitting 20" away from a 30" monitor and could easily take advantage of a bigger screen with more resolution. Detail sometimes matters. How far from your face do you hold a book?
Still images require greater resolution than movies for the same level of visual satisfaction.
Early laser printers had 300 dpi, which was visibly inferior to printed material. That's 2550 pixels across a letter-size sheet of paper. Can you honestly say there's no use for having three sheets of paper visible at once?
Some manufacturers are making Adobe 1998 RGB monitors. Even wider gamut is technically possible, but requires engineering compromises like narrow-bandwidth filters which are less efficient, or expensive options like more than 3 channels of LED backlights, or laser backlights, etc.. Sharp did introduce a 4-color TV, has this given them any market advantage?
High brightness is of little use indoors, and is a disadvantage for motion picture display because it requires a higher framerate. Tom's Hardware considers brightness over the 200 nits they test at to be excessive.
It's where K-k-k-katy lives. She's the only g-g-g-girl that I adore.
It takes over $2000 just to process an 8 inch wafer, from which you'd get just one 4x5 sensor almost guaranteed to be defective. This is not a practical basis for anything but extreme niche applications.
I too would like to see a digital Pellix. This would allow the sensor chamber to be completely sealed, and would reduce vibration somewhat.
SLR viewfinders have been very bright for 20 years or so. It's OK to let 75% of the light go to the sensor.
Oops, sorry. Take out one of the inverses.
Depth of field is roughly proportional to the f number and inversely proportional to the inverse square of the focal length. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperfocal_distance
Compact cameras are marvels. My $130 Canon A1100IS has about 75% of the resolution of a mid-range 35mm camera with mid-speed film. It's likelier to produce a usable image because of image stabilization and because a smaller lens means greater depth of field.
Fixing the problems caused by the Bayer pattern sensor is an ongoing challenge. The problem is getting the last bit of detail from an image without introducing false color. There have been improvements in recent years, and I'd guess we're pretty close to the limit of what's possible.
Camera manufacturers actually intentionally blur the image slightly before it gets to the sensor to reduce the problem of light either producing false colors or "falling in the cracks."