Technology Quarterly 62
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."
From the "thought-controlled computers" article... (Score:3, Interesting)
Yikes. But towards a possible solution:
Re:From the "thought-controlled computers" article (Score:4, Interesting)
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).
Though Controlled Computers (Score:5, Funny)
sorry.
Re:Though Controlled Computers (Score:3, Funny)
WAIT! I didn't mean it that way...
(I couldn't bring myself to link to goatse or tubgirl.)
Re:Though Controlled Computers (Score:1)
I don't think I'm going to be eating for about a week or so...
Re:Though Controlled Computers (Score:2)
Fool... you got what you deserved...
Re:Though Controlled Computers (Score:1)
But hey, at least now I can send it to my unsuspecting friends *evil grin
Re:Though Controlled Computers (Score:1, Funny)
Forward
Back
Forward
Back
.
.
.
Measuring data (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:Measuring data (Score:3, Insightful)
Haha. Hahaha. Er, no. We know that some data was created, that's for damn sure. Look at
easy... (Score:2)
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
Similiar. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm...all his later work seems so similiar.
Wow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Wow (Score:2)
That won't get money into HUD's. What will get money into HUD's will be sex.
As soon as the VR vagina [onzin.nl] is invented as an accesory to the VR glasses, you're going to see guys lined up around the corner to spend an intimate moment with their favorite girl [fateback.com] from DOA3
"Computers that can read your mind" (Score:5, Funny)
The article I liked best (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The article I liked best (Score:3, Interesting)
AI Robots aren't bad enough (Score:5, Funny)
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?
Re:AI Robots aren't bad enough (Score:1)
Slashdot heaven? (Score:2, Insightful)
Maybe they're intentionally trying to get Slashdot readership?
The Economist (Score:5, Informative)
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."
Re:The Economist (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Economist (Score:1)
Jaysyn
Re:The Economist (Score:2)
Re:The Economist (Score:1)
Re:The Economist (Score:1)
Re:The Economist (Score:1)
Re:The Economist (Score:2)
Re:The Economist (Score:1)
what about the learning curve? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:what about the learning curve? (Score:3, Informative)
Then the scientists removed the joystic
Re:Thought control (Score:1)
Thought-controlled Pacman (Score:4, Interesting)
Human Pacman [nus.edu.sg]
Open Source translations (Score:2)
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 volunteerin
baked chips (Score:1)
Mandelbrodt is NOT the father of fractals! (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org] 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 [wikipedia.org].
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
Re:Mandelbrodt (sic) is NOT the father of fractals (Score:1)
I was jokin' about that. I'm all but certain the author doesn't know any more about Julia than what Mandelbrot said in their interview, or what appears in the boilerplate bio blurbs of Mandelbrot.
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 lowe
One Implication (Score:1)
Uh oh (Score:3, Interesting)
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...."
Believe it or not... (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenEEG (Score:3, Informative)
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