Re: Confusing
Exactly. I tried to buy a display for a series 5 watch. Not one to be found anywhere. Not even flea-bay.
214 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2011
I hooked up a Canon 5DS SLR as a webcam during serious serious lockdown. It was just something to do to while away the time. A bit excessive, but you could control DOF and focal length. The image was very good, much better than my webcam, even when downscaled to 720.
The 1+ Billion Euro 10-year EU Human Brain Project, which has similar aims and much, much more academic input, has not, by most accounts, been a glittering success. As lots of other people have said, we really know very little in detail about how interactions between neurons in the brain give rise to useful information processing. We don't know which properties need to be simulated and which are irrelevant. There is certainly a great deal of analog computation involved. Some of this is likely intra-cellular. There are lots of cell types which are not neurons but which may play some role. I am not optimistic. (Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience by trade)
I still have a 5150, Mono, 64K with original keyboard and monitor sitting on top of a filing cabinet in my office. It is an incredible thing. You could drive a truck over it and it would be unscathed. Also came with a manual containing the assembly source for the BIOS which was super useful for my job at the time which involved researching user interface design by mucking around with the cursor as a status indicator. We got a FORTAN compiler for it at some point, so I programmed it in FORTRAN with all the real stuff in MASM (I think - long time ago).
To quote Forbes: "By law, American companies have to report child abuse and exploitation imagery on their servers to NCMEC, which then works with law enforcement on an investigation. Other tech giants do the same when emails or messages are sent over their platforms. That includes Google, Microsoft and Facebook."
Again, nowhere in the same league, but something that surprised me nevertheless. I was a very junior postdoc in the UK doing some programming on a project in vision science on a new Mac II. I was having trouble manipulating colour tables in the vertical retrace interrupt which didn't seem to behave in the way they were described in 'Inside Macintosh' so I posted a question to the appropriate usenet new group (including my academic affiliation, address and phone number). The next day I received a phone call from someone who said they were with Apple and would like to try and help with my problem. The phone line wasn't great and was getting worse so I offered to call back after about quarter of an hour - they bloke on the other end said not to try unless I could get free international calls as he was calling from Cupertino. I was bowled over. Also we sorted out my problem.
El Bobbo is a mysterious enigma within a deep but incomprehensible poem. He probably allowed Starbucks to use a song because the shade of green in their logo reminded him of the guitar owned by some legendary bluesman whose name no one knows and of whom no songs were ever recorded and where none remain alive who heard him play. [ Married to a Dylan fan, so I know of that about which I speak. ]
This conference paper is ridiculously cool, and the optical sensor they use (with great success), a MAX30105 only costs about a tenner (I've just ordered one to play with for integrating into VR with Unity).
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S240589631932631X
Isn't the performance of the M1 predicated on tight, SoC, coupling between its various components - CPUs, GPU, Memory, NN thing, etc.? My (not very educated) guess would be that this means an Mx supporting discrete graphics etc. is a bit unlikely. They could up the ante on the built in graphics, or the built in memory, but you aren't going to add more yourself and maintain performance.
Just as a point of interesting information, a paper was published fairly recently that demonstrated that a species of fish (a cleaner wrasse) could pass a fish-oriented version of the mirror self-recognition test https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.3000021. Now this may, or may not, demonstrate that fish have a sense of self. What it does do, is cause one to question exactly what the mirror self-recognition test itself demonstrates. Maybe one has to think a little more carefully about the means by which one might test whether an animal (or an infant) is self-aware.
One might also think about this issue when deciding whether all of the "I've seen my dog do xyz so it is obvious that it has some human-like mental world" are actually worth paying any attention to. One of the founders of comparative psychology in the 19th century, George Romanes, tried to develop a theory of comparative intelligence by collecting and collating such anecdotes - it was an abject failure. I wrote some lectures about this decades ago that were posted on the web by other academic sites (with my permission) - not sure if they're still up...
God there are a lot of the "I think xyz is true so it must be" brigade out today. The idea in science is that we test hypotheses in order to assess their validity. But I see I'm wrong here - all we need to do is have an opinion.
ps I think this will be downvoted by exactly the same group of people who believe opinion trumps science. Did you see what I did there?
I had a Sun 3/60 many years ago. One thing I think I remember about SunOS 3.2 and 3.5, but my memory might be faulty, was that they had a partition scheme in which stuff you really shouldn't mess with was mounted read-only. I think it saved me, an academic not a proper sysadmin, on more than one occasion. This was around the same time that one of my colleagues decided to remove all the unused files in /dev on the departmental server (another Sun box) - enough remained in memory to rescue the system from the command line. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man (me) is King.
I taught programming to university students on the BBC Micro - their work was 'saved' on cassettes. Got some disc drives later and so could play Elite while they struggled with the exercises. I was quite amazed at the 3D feel of Elite and how immersed you got, even if it was all green lines. The game I remember being even more impressed with was the free flight simulator (not really simulator, not realistic, just fun) on the first Archimedes. There was also a flight sim game on SGI workstations around then (maybe even a bit later) and the Archimedes one was just as good apart from the fact that you could network the SGIs if you happened to have a few Indigos or Irises lying around.
I heard the Rob Newman radio show in question. He is a very funny comedian. He is not a neuroscientist. He appeared to seriously misunderstand what is going on in analyses of fMRI signals which aim at stimulus decoding. There are some freely available papers by Niko Kriegskorte that explain it. Here is a good one (I think this one is now free) https://www.pnas.org/content/103/10/3863. [ BTW I am a neuroscientist. I was working information processing in neural networks, artificial and real, in the late 1980s, although I do more work with neuropsychologial patients these days. I don't know as much about this stuff now as people like Kreigskorte, who I have heard talk and who I am very impressed by. ]
I'm surprised there are so many comments suggesting people change their phone when the battery dies. I have got another 18 months to 2 years out of replacement batteries which cost a fraction of a new phone. I bought smartphones in 2008, 2014, and 2019. The first two had 3rd party battery replacements (1st one done by me, second one done by a bloke in a tiny shop) that extended their lives by said 18 month to a couple of years. All iPhones if you care. Apple have, finally, come out with a new feature that tempts me - a small size option. I'll still probably wait, do the battery replacement for the XS in a year or two and get a new phone in 2024 though.
This is the company that switched from Motorola 680x0 to PowerPC to Intel to Apple's own take on ARM pretty painlessly*. They seem quite good at dealing with major changes to me. Pretty ridiculous article if you ask me.
* I'm not counting the 6502 - switching from that also involved the user switching to a quite different OS/Interface.
I think the new font is the BBC's very own new 'Reith' font. It was, at one point available to download in case you were going to create any content for the BBC. It is horrible. I can't understand why on earth they thought they needed their own font, let alone one as ugly as this. They were planning to move everything over to 'Reith' in the future.
Quarantine in response to notification from the app is voluntary, so you will not be fined if you ignore it (although you will likely be an idiot). Quarantine in response to a call from Serco's track and trace is not voluntary and you may be fined if you ignore the instruction.
Barrett said back when the project was launched, "but by partnering today with stakeholders across industries and agencies, we can set up the United States for this aerospace phenomenon."
I read this as "but by partnering today with SKATEBOARDERS across industries and agencies..."
I think they might have more success if they did partner with skateboarders for this one.
A friend of mine who was doing his PhD and programming PCs in Prolog to do something to do with analysing people's understanding of skin diseases (shades of The Singing Detective) took it on himself to 'tidy up' a sparcstation 2 that was about to replace something ancient we'd been using as a fileserver and host for some early experiments in website design (this is 1990 or so). For some reason he decided (as root) to delete /dev as it seemed to be full of lots of useless empty files. Not a good idea.The machine was connected to a network and the console was running the SunOS 4.1 GUI with a terminal open. I did not know much more than my friend, but I did have my own Sun 3/60 and I'd been on a short course for scientists who had to deal with new-fangled workstation things. I have forgotten how I did it, but armed with my trusty SERC 'how to be a unix system admin' manual that came with the two day course I'd done, I managed to retrieve everything. In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
What is the new full definition of the Candela? It is an interesting SI unit because it is not defined wholly in physical terms. It is a psychophysical unit in that it takes into account the function relating the sensitivity of the human visual system to lights of different wavelengths (V(lambda)). There should only be one wavelength where the candela can be defined wholly physically, for every other wavelength that value (in watts per steradian - that's where you can get the caesium atom transitions and fractions of the speed of light in) there must be multiplication by V(lambda). Someone just has to measure that (V(lambda)) with real people by asking them to make judgements about the relative brightness of lights of different colours (wavelengths). How is that bit (measurement of V(lambda)) now defined?
See the incredibly beautiful study of Hecht, Shlaer, and Pirenne (1942) Energy, quanta and vision. J. Gen. Physiol. 20 819-840. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2142545/ Dark adapted human rod cells require between 5 and 8 quanta on average to produce a neural signal. After the effects of absorption by parts of the eye between the outside world and the retina this corresponds to an ability of the humans tested to detect between 54 and 148 quanta (i.e. that's all you need to see a light under optimal conditions - the integration time is about 100ms, so all the quanta have to arrive within 100ms for optimal performance).
Here is the relevant section of the paper's abstract:
"With these three corrections, the range of 54 to 148 quanta at the cornea becomes as an upper limit 5 to 14 quanta actually absorbed by the retinal rods. 3. This small number of quanta, in comparison with the large number of rods (500) involved, precludes any significant two quantum absorptions per rod, and means that in order to produce a visual effect, one quantum must be absorbed by each of 5 to 14 rods in the retina. 4. Because this number of individual events is so small, it may be derived from an independent statistical study of the relation between the intensity of a light flash and the frequency with which it is seen. Such experiments give values of 5 to 8 for the number of critical events involved at the threshold of vision."
Your truly,
A Vision Scientist.
I'm amazed at how many of the tin-foil hat brigade showed up for this one. If you are that paranoid about surveillance and the lengths higher powers will go to to get it, then surely you realise that the NSA have 'special' code inserted into all smartphone OSs and every network adapter driver for every operating system used by more than five people. Despite all this guff about the security of open-source, no-one actually checks everything (and they don't know the 'one special trick').