lighting up those memories, palm connection, rescuing woodrow wilson
January 31, 2008 at 10:42 am | In graphic art, history, progressive, science | Leave a CommentThe singularity probably isn’t around the corner, but scientists can plug you in and see what happens, Deep brain stimulation evokes long-lost memories
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more than 30 years previously. They also found that the electrical stimulation improved the patient’s performance on associative memory tasks.
Kidding aside this”serendipitous discovery” has been used to treat Parkinson’s Disease and shows some promise for treating Alzheimer’s.
Calling a book Liberal Fascism is like asking for a glass of dry water, both examples of trying to get two opposing states of reality to be the same. Liberalism is the opposite of fascism.The author manages to make everything and everyone that he doesn’t approve of a fascist, including Woodrow Wilson (U.S. President 1913-1921) among many others. I’m not part of any Wilson fan cult, but he was hardly a fascist. An historian chimes in at Orcinus and sets the record straight, Wilson and fascism
its those darn connections between hemispheres, leaving tracks
January 30, 2008 at 11:35 am | In culture, photography, photoshop, sociology | Leave a CommentWhy Men can’t hold a conversation and watch TV at the same time
In order to understand why this is, we need to look at how the brain works. The left and right brain hemispheres are connected by a bundle of nerve fibres called the corpus callosum. This cable lets both sides of the brain exchange information. Neurologist Roger Gorski, of the University of California, in LA, confirmed that a woman’s brain has a corpus callosum that is ten per cent thicker than a man’s, and has up to 30 per cent more connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
The hard wired neurological aspects of gender differences might be news to some. The rest everyone has probably heard, such as women develop language skills earlier and are generally better at expressing ideas earlier in life. While men are better then average map readers. Studies like this published in the popular press almost never show you the variance scale. Thus some women might fell because they’re not great at multi-tasking they are to some degree failures. Likewise with men that look at a map and see nothing but red lines and numbers and feel like real goof balls because they’re not living up to the latest study. There is a lot of variation between individuals and these studies point up general tendencies not what you are capable of as a unique person. At least that’s my take.
growing up online, plaza cibeles, ethical terminators, blue canal wallpaper
January 29, 2008 at 11:42 am | In news, photography, photoshop, sociology, tech culture | Leave a CommentGrowing Up Online, and Still Bored
Problem is, even with all the added dilemmas that come along with new technology, a lot of these issues essentially feel like the same ones that have always plagued bored adolescents. Kids interviewed in the story talk about depression, bullying, feeling self-conscious about their weight, being mad at their parents, and being unsure about their identity. Parents talk about not really knowing their children, the difficulty in disciplining them, and not knowing what their kids are up to when they’re in the bedroom with the door shut.
These don’t sound like cyber-problems to me, they sound like kids being kids and parents not knowing how to deal. Once an antsy suburban kid myself, I can relate. The fancy computer machines may complicate things, but is the box to blame for age-old dilemmas of growing up?
Someone should start marketing something like a Pet Rock except call it the Blame Box. It would stand in for that external something or other that holds some super power over kids and if parents could only make that go away their kid would be the most well adjusted human specimen on the planet. Kids as a culture that passes down behavior from one age class to the next year after year do share some of the fault for their problems. Who’s going to figure out how to break the chain of destructive and self destructive behavior from one mini-generation to the next.
plaza cibeles - madrid
The Terminator prequel coming soon to a battlefield near you, Computer scientists debate what socially responsible researchers should do in an era of high-tech warfare
Arkin argued that Pentagon planners are determined to create war-fighting machines that eventually will be able to decide – autonomously – whether or not to kill. Since war-bots are coming, Arkin said, computer scientists should help design their self-control programs.
Arkin, who said his work is funded in part by military sources, said that with the proper ethical controls, robotic soldiers could be more humane than human soldiers because they would be less prone to act out of rage in the heat of combat.
Citing a 2006 Mental Health Advisory Team study for the U.S. Army’s Surgeon General, Arkin noted that 10 percent of soldiers and Marines reported mistreating civilians by unnecessarily hitting them or destroying property. “We could reduce man’s inhumanity to man through technology,” he said.
Except for you know where and a few hot spots in Africa the world is relatively peaceful right now. One wonders if robotic armies might increase the temptation to settle things on the battlefield rather then the conference table. At least they’ll be ethical robots, unless they’re made by the robot maker equivalent of Diebold.
math versus religion, snow rock and leaf, invitro chip to substitue for some animal tests
January 28, 2008 at 10:32 am | In Philosophy & Religion, culture, news, photography, photoshop, science | Leave a CommentMath + religion = Trouble offers up an intriguing look at the history of mixing of mathematics and religion. There’s a very concise skip down natural history lane that includes some very bright people such as Baruch Spinoza who was excommunicated for claiming that mathematics were instruments of the divine. Relatively few modern mathematicians are theists, though slightly more then biologists. Nobel winning physicist Steven Weinberg has a fair handed if curmudgeonly summation of the matter “With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion.”
Researchers seek animal test alternative
Bailey agrees that in vitro chips hold the most promise, but said the chips still need to be validated before companies can have more confidence in them. He noted that chips have limitations when it comes to risk assessment, such as determining if particular doses of a substance pose a cancer risk.
The product developed by Dordick and Clark consists of two glass slides. The first, called the MetaChip, has rows of little blots containing human liver enzymes. The other slide, the DataChip, contains an identical array of blots which, depending on the test, could be live human bladder, liver, kidney, heart, skin or lung cell cultures. Sandwiched together, the two chips mimic the human body’s reaction to compounds.
If the cells die or stop growing, it’s a sign that a toxin was present.
This doesn’t mean the end of animal testing when it comes to the newest mascara, but closer to using fewer animals to make sure societies newest vanities don’t cause a rash.
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