Monday, November 21, 2005

No, No, No....this isn't what happened at all..

In a recent post on both Physorg and on Slashdot, they promote work done at the MIT McGovern Brain Institute as leading or deriving from a direct nueral interface. Not so. The research centered on what parts of the human and monkey brain parses faces, figures, familiar structures and abstract input (4 different spots, actually). It doesn't come up with a common grammer either for individual images or even give a general area for such things that translates into a human/monkey similarity.

It is -remarkable- research, but we're not going to jacking in around anytime soon because of it. There was a presentation about this research at the McGovern Institute opening, which I was inexplicably invited to. I asked around, I still don't know who invited me. I went. It was fun. (the band, pictured above, had some very zany instruments....but I forgot their name. Update: Mass Ensemble...)

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Oh, and before you ask..

It is worth pointing out that the special effects in Doctor Who are still more "special" than effects. Still, great show.

Doctor Who (a fanboy post)

When I was growing up in Utah, I discovered the reruns of doctor who on our local pbs stations. It was on at 10pm on Sunday nights, and they ran two episodes. So I grew up watching Jon Pertwee's doctor (for a little bit), but it was mostly all about Tom Baker. Anyhow, The BBC revived the series last year, putting Christopher Eccleston in the role. I was slightly doubtful, at first, but the new series was amazing. Not just updating the series, but Eccleston was insanely ridiculously holy crap awesome. I was mildly pissed that he only has stayed for the one (amazing, terrific, brilliant) season.

So there you go....The Tenth Doctor will be played by David Tennant, who my wife says was great in viva blackpool. He was fine with a very short role in the most recent Harry Potter movie, which was alright.

And before you ask....yes, I owned a long ass scarf, a la Baker. Completely impractical for skiing, but it was great stuff. Looked a lot like the one in Fig E. on that page. Wonder what happened to that thing...

Also, I have a zillion versions of the theme song in my mp3 archive. Bum bum bum, bum bum bum, bum bum bum bum bum bum...

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Firefox good.

If you are a solid developer, check out this req: Google Jobs - Software Engineer, Firefox. Email me if you like.

Thursday, November 10, 2005

Sony DRM Story gets much worse.

I'm not a big fan of DRM, and the whole Sony story has been nothing less than an appalling breach of customer trust. Consider the following:First Trojan Using Sony DRM Detected. A trojan exploiting a root kit exploiting user trust in a cd rom. So very lame. Sony, if the stack of broken TR505's we had back in the day at VA Research wasn't enough to make me want to avoid you, this would certainly put the last nail in that coffin.

Oh, one other thing, if you could make the PSP a bit uglier so I wouldn't want to buy it, that would be great too. Thanks.