Late last year I did an article about the simulation of parts of the the human brain on a massive scale called SPAUN that was implemented using software called Nengo. The basic concept behind SPAUN, as you may recall, is that it is a functional model of some aspects of the human brain which duplicate some of the neural networks as well as the myriad connections between them. What isn't obvious is that this connection model was developed in part through the microscopic examination of many human brains post mortem plus many different kinds of scans carried out on living …
There seem to be a couple of problems inherent in the tech field of prosthetic design. First and foremost of them is that comparatively few people need artificial limbs, so not enough of them are manufactured at once to bring the cost down. A second problem is that because so few people tend to need them, designs don't seem to improve very rapidly. When enough of anything are not constructed, there isn't enough pressure for bugs to be ironed out rapidly, nor for designs to evolve in positive directions so relatively simple advances may not appear soon. Business and industry …
Rather than stay home for my birthday (which I've done for the past few years) I decided to make things interesting this time 'round the sun. Sitwon and Haxwithaxe had secured a hotel room and passes for Shmoocon in downtown DC last weekend, so I threw my hat into the ring more or less at the last minute. Shmoocon is an excellent hacker conference, don't get me wrong, but I don't ordinarily get much out of it. It is, as they say around here, above my pay grade. That said, I decided to go solely to see what I could …
In the abstract, it's always been easy to figure out what to post on my birthday. I can think about it in the car on my way in to work and have some ideas of where to go and what to say, but when it comes time to put fingers to keys to actually write something, words scatter like dust in a sunbeam. Funny how that happpens, usually with really personal things. So, time for a little nonlinear text editing, where I scribble random ideas, and go back later to rearrange and flesh …
Long-time members of the open source community no doubt remember iBiblio.org, which is one of the first and largest online archives of open source software. It doesn't see as much love as it used to due to how many open source project hosting sites there are out there (including the venerable Sourceforge, Github, and Google Code). Also, because cheap to free personal web hosting is so common, it's trivial to upload your projects these days. In recent years, however, the iBiblio team set up Terasaur, a BitTorrent tracker which makes it much easier to distribute large projects (such as …
Now that I have a little time to breathe, I've updated my .plan file. Per usual, the contents range from the funny to the politically incorrect to the vulgar. Exercise discretion if you're at work or in public.
So, it's been slightly over a week since 2013.ev began (and Happy New Year to everyone, by the bye), and I haven't posted so much as an opening evocation for the new year. Where, one or two of you may be asking, has the Doctor been? Did he dive into the time vortex on 21 December 2012 and get lost (again)?
The answer is no, I didn't go traipsing around time and space, as much as I'd like to have done so. I took the last two weeks of the year off and tried my hardest to take a …
For those of you who watch the tech field, you've no doubt heard of Ray Kurzweil, the inventor, technologist, and futurist who's been promulgating the "The Singularity is near!" meme since the 1980's. Love him or hate him, he's a brilliant man who's invented some fantastic, practical things. One of the things he talks about a great deal is how strong AI, which many now refer to as Artificial General Intelligence (i.e., human-like intelligence and sapience) is just a few years away, and he cites Moore's Law as evidence of this. Of course, a lot of people think he's …
For many years, the development of pharmaceutical drugs has been kind of hit or miss. New and interesting bioactive compounds are discovered and tested in different laboratory animals until someone figures out what a particular compound might be good for. It isn't terribly common that a pharmaceutical company comes up with an idea for an effect and then works backward until they find a compound that will do what they hope to accomplish.
That shows signs of changing.
A company called Parabon Nanolabs in Reston, Virginia has announced the development of a new drug which is effective in treating one …
