Month: April 2007

The oldest story ever written

There’s no better illustration of the fragility and the power of literature than the history of “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” the oldest known literary work, composed in Babylonia more than 3 ka ago. 400 years later, after one of the ruthless, bloody sieges typical of that time, the epic was buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace. There it lay, utterly forgotten along with the name of the king who once reigned in that palace, until a British archaeologist unearthed it not far from the modern city of Mosul in 1840.

David Damrosch’s artful, engrossing new history, “The Buried Book,” relates how “The Epic of Gilgamesh” was lost and found — or rather how it was found and lost, since he tells the story backward, from the present to the past, in an archaeological fashion.

Desktop Last.fm

Wakoopa’s tracker logs what applications you use and for how long, updating your personal profile every 15 minutes. On the website, the aggregate data lists the most recently used applications and most used applications of all time. Each application has a profile that lists the people and groups who use it, reviews, and tags.

on the other hand, microsoft already has all this usage tracking infrastructure, but what are the chances of that being widely available? maybe all this data could lead to non-annoying clippy suggestions. that would actually be kind of awesome.

Antichrist denied entry

It’s hard to imagine a country more traditional, and more religious, than Guatemala. For that reason, news that the country is denying entry to a cult leader who tattooed “666” on his arm, calls himself The Antichrist, and whose (alleged) 2M followers describe him as a living deity — it’s pretty far out.

in this case i find it hard to decide who is more retarded

Improved NYC Subway Map

Mr. Jabbour pinned 2 maps to the wall, then pointed to the different renderings of the Atlantic Avenue terminal in Brooklyn, which he says is the most difficult station to represent because so many subway lines converge there. In Mr. Jabbour’s map, the subway lines run parallel to one another, making the map easier to read, if slightly inaccurate. Each line is marked with a circle bearing the route’s letter or number, instead of the oblong station markers used on the current map.

Sometimes truth is less important than knowledge.

Brain simulation

IBM researchers assembled a simulated mouse cortical hemisphere on one of the smaller BlueGene/L supercomputers. They then ran the simulation — at 10s of computer processing equal to 1s of brain function.
2008-03-04: Blue Brain

the brain has 100b neurons and 1t synapses. So they need to scale up the neurons by 10m and the synapses by 33K. By 2017, there should be a single whole brain simulation. Personalized whole brain simulation would follow by 2027-2037.

Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain.

2008-10-29: The scale needed

There are petaflop supercomputers now so if such a system were dedicated to brain emulation a system 10x larger than the rat brain could be simulated.

2014-03-14: A fun monte carlo simulation of when whole brain emulation will become feasible:

50% chance for WBE (if it ever arrives) before 2059, with the 25th % in 2047 and the 75th % in 2074. WBE before 2030 looks very unlikely and only 10% likely before 2040

2015-09-11: Ethics of brain simulations

What I hope happens is that computational neuroscientists think a bit about the issue of suffering in their simulations rather than slip into the comfortable “It is just a simulation, it cannot feel anything” mode of thinking by default.

It is easy to tell oneself that simulations do not matter because not only do we know how they work when we make them (giving us the illusion that we actually know everything there is to know about the system – obviously not true since we at least need to run them to see what happens), but institutionally it is easier to regard them as non-problems in terms of workload, conflicts and complexity (let’s not rock the boat at the planning meeting, right?) And once something is in the “does not matter morally” category it becomes painful to move it out of it – many will now be motivated to keep it there.

2021-06-18: Towards the mouse brain connectome

A connectomic study of a petascale fragment of human cerebral cortex”, Shapson-Coe et al 2021 (“…This “digital tissue” is a ~660K× scale up of an earlier saturated reconstruction from a small region of mouse cortex, published in 2015 (Kasthuri et al 2015). Although this scaleup was difficult, it was not 100000x more difficult and took about the same amount of time as the previous data set (~4 years)…The rapid improvements over the past few years…argues that analyzing volumes that are even 3 orders of magnitude larger, such as an exascale whole mouse brain connectome, will likely be in reach within 10 years.”

2023-08-31: Human Brain Project retrospective

It took 10 years, 500 scientists and €600m, and now the Human Brain Project — one of the biggest research endeavors ever funded by the European Union — is coming to an end. Its audacious goal was to understand the human brain by modelling it in a computer.

During its run, scientists under the umbrella of the Human Brain Project (HBP) have published 1000s of papers and made significant strides in neuroscience, such as creating detailed 3D maps of at least 200 brain regions, developing brain implants to treat blindness and using supercomputers to model functions such as memory and consciousness and to advance treatments for various brain conditions. The project did not achieve its goal of simulating the whole human brain — an aim that many scientists regarded as far-fetched in the first place. It changed direction several times, and its scientific output became “fragmented and mosaic-like”.

FreePops

FreePOPs is an easily extensible program, which allows access to the most varied resources through the POP3 protocol. Mainly, it can be used to download mail from the most famous webmails

that should do for migrating my old spam catcher account off of yahoo mail. about time.