"brains" entries

Four short links: 10 July 2015

Four short links: 10 July 2015

King Rat Brain, Emojactions, Dead Eye, and Cloud Value

  1. Computer of Wired-Together Rat Brains — this is ALL THE AMAZING. a Brainet that allows three monkeys connected at the brain to control a virtual arm on screen across three axes. […] Nicolelis said that, essentially, he created a “classic artificial neural network using brains.” In that sense, it’s not artificial at all. (via Slashdot)
  2. Reactions — Slack turns emoji into first-class interactions. Genius!
  3. Pixar’s Scientific MethodIf you turn your head without moving your eyes first, it looks like you’re dead. Now there’s your uncanny valley.
  4. AWS CodePipeline — latest in Amazon’s build-out of cloud tools. Interchangeable commodity platforms regaining lockin via higher-order less-interchangeable tooling for deployment, config, monitoring, etc.
Four short links: 17 April 2015

Four short links: 17 April 2015

Distributed SQLite, Communicating Scientists, Learning from Failure, and Cat Convergence

  1. Replicating SQLite using Raft Consensus — clever, he used a consensus algorithm to build a distributed (replicated) SQLite.
  2. When Open Access is the Norm, How do Scientists Communicate? (PLOS) — From interviews I’ve conducted with researchers and software developers who are modeling aspects of modern online collaboration, I’ve highlighted the most useful and reproducible practices. (via Jon Udell)
  3. Meet DJ Patil“It was this kind of moment when you realize: ‘Oh, my gosh, I am that stupid,’” he said.
  4. Interview with Bruce Sterling on the Convergence of Humans and MachinesIf you are a human being, and you are doing computation, you are trying to multiply 17 times five in your head. It feels like thinking. Machines can multiply, too. They must be thinking. They can do math and you can do math. But the math you are doing is not really what cognition is about. Cognition is about stuff like seeing, maneuvering, having wants, desires. Your cat has cognition. Cats cannot multiply 17 times five. They have got their own umwelt (environment). But they are mammalian, you are a mammalian. They are actually a class that includes you. You are much more like your house cat than you are ever going to be like Siri. You and Siri converging, you and your house cat can converge a lot more easily. You can take the imaginary technologies that many post-human enthusiasts have talked about, and you could afflict all of them on a cat. Every one of them would work on a cat. The cat is an ideal laboratory animal for all these transitions and convergences that we want to make for human beings. (via Vaughan Bell)
Four short links: 1 March 2012

Four short links: 1 March 2012

Crowdsourced Monitoring, DIY Neurobio, A Plethora of Memory Stick Computers

  1. Crowdsourcing Radiation Data in Japan (Freaklabs) — wardriving pollution detection.
  2. Backyard Brains — measuring electrical activity of a neuron in a cockroach leg. Astonishing how much science is within the reach of backyard hackers now. (via BoingBoing)
  3. Cotton Candy Stick Pre-Orders — a $200 Android computer on a USB stick, with HDMI out etc.
  4. Raspberry Pi Launches — $35 USB+CPU+video+audio ships. Interesting that both of these have come to fruition at the same time. Something is in the air. How will the world change when every memory stick is a computer, not just every phone?
Four short links: 6 September 2010

Four short links: 6 September 2010

Game Engine, Enterprise Twitteralike, Open Microbiome, and Good Mental Habits

  1. Akihabara (Github) — open source (GPL2 and MIT dual-licensed) HTML5/Javascript engine for classic arcade games. (via chadfowler on Twitter)
  2. Eureka Streams — open sourced Java app for enterprise Twitter-like activity: build a profile, join groups, post updates, subscribe to updates from individuals or groups. (via dlpeters on Twitter)
  3. Open Microbiome — hoping to build open tools, standard samples, data, and metadata for analysis of the microbiome (all the microorganisms that live in, on, and with macroorganisms like us). Early days, but glad to see people are already thinking of building this research open from the ground up. And if you think sequencing the human genome gave us a lot of data we struggle to find patterns in, wait until you start including microorganisms: we have 10x as many bacteria in us as we have cells and the species variety is vast. (via phylogenomics on Twitter)
  4. Habits of Mathematical Minds — fantastic list of skills and approaches that are hallmarks of many successful minds, not just in mathematics. (via ddmeyer on Twitter)
Four short links: 5 April 2010

Four short links: 5 April 2010

Intelligence, Community, Compression, and UI Hackery

  1. Wrong about the iPad (Tim Bray) — I am actively ignoring the iPad drivel, but this line caught my eye: Intelligence is a text-based application.
  2. Fertile Medium — online community consultancy, from the first and former Flickr community coordinator. One to watch: Heather and Derek really know their community. Again I say it: understanding of how open source and other collaborative communities can function is rare and valuable. (via waxy)
  3. pigz — parallel gzip implementation. Voom voom, so fast! (via kellan on Delicious
  4. Prefab: What If We Could Modify Any Interface? — screen-scraping for GUIs to bolt on new functionality to user interfaces. This is incredible. Watch the demo, it’s impressive!