Some of you might be wondering why I've been around only sporadically for the past couple of months.  Observant readers have undoubtedly noticed that no small number of my posts lately have had identical timestamps - sometimes five or six posts all in one day that went live days or weeks apart.  You may also have noticed that some of my posts are "gimme" posts, which is to say that they're just photograph dumps from months in the past, with few captions and little (usually no) attempts made to clean them up.  Friends near and far have noticed that I've been …

Late in 2014 I had cause to undergo magnetic resonance imaging of my head as a diagnostic procedure. If you've never had one before, this procedure can involve a head x-ray (to make sure you don't have any ferrous material in tender places that might get ripped out by a very powerful magnetic field). It definitely does involve an hour or two laying on your back on a backboard with snug straps holding you in place (because if you move it'll mess up the imaging data) while you're stuffed into a relatively small tube in the core of the MRI …

The field of artificial intelligence has taken many twists and turns on the journey toward its as-yet unrealized goal of building a human-equivalent machine intelligence. We're not there yet, but we've found lots of interesting things along the way. One of the things that has been discovered is that, if you understand it well enough (and there are degrees of approximation, to be sure) it's possible to use what you know to build logic circuits that work the same way - neuromorphic processing. The company AeroVironment recently test-flew a miniature drone which had as its spatial navigation system a prototype neuromorphic …