Posts by Squeensnex 19 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jan 2015
These cars are continuously monitored. I was surprised that someone tried to carjack one, with predictable results.
https://lamag.com/crimeinla/los-angeles-man-tries-fails-carjack-self-driving-waymo-taxi
I imagine stripping one before the police arrived would be quite challenging.
There's a real-life parallel that is used for patients with intractable epilepsy, at least in the sense that it uses electrodes implanted in the brain to record activity. In this case, the implanted device detects the onset of seizure activity and applies electrical pulses to prevent the seizure. In the long run, this may reduce the need for epilepsy surgery in which the part of the brain from which seizures originate is removed. This device is somewhat less invasive than surgery, and has the advantage that it could be removed (the changes from surgery are most certainly permanent).
https://www.neuropace.com/patients/neuropace-rns-system/#how-it-works
Other devices include deep brain stimulators, which stimulate but don't record electrical activity. They're on all the time, though they can be controlled externally to change the stimulus parameters (frequency, amplitude) or turn them off if necessary. They're used mainly for Parkinson disease and dystonia.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/treatment-tests-and-therapies/deep-brain-stimulation
Is it just me, or does the quote "write polished prose, craft impressive emails, and posts on your favourite sites like LinkedIn, Gmail, Facebook, and more." seem to have an errant comma or three? Perhaps they mean "write polished prose to craft impressive emails and posts on your favourite sites like LinkedIn, Gmail, Facebook and more."
The article says "we used unilaterally amputated monkeys that had undergone therapeutic amputation several years (two of them with 9 to 10 years and a third monkey over 4 years) before they arrived in our lab." It doesn't sound like they were amputated for the study, and the length of amputation is relevant to eventual studies in humans, who may have been missing a limb for a long time.
I think they used electrodes in either "contralateral" or"ipsilateral" motor cortex to study the reorganization of neuronal circuitry that was (ipsilateral) or wasn't (contralateral) controlling an intact arm at the time. The reorganization was different in the two cases.
While people do have brain electrodes permanently implanted to help control Parkinson's disease (deep brain stimulation), having electrodes implanted isn't for the faint of heart!
When text paging was new, a friend of mine was making a presentation when his pager went off with the message "Your fly is open!" A quick check showed his zipper was actually up, and he continued the presentation. A few minutes his pager went off again, this time with the message "Made you look!"
He never did figure out who sent the pages.
I test drove a Model S last month. It goes 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.1 s with no wheel spin and no noise except the whine of the electric motors. It feels like you're being shot out of a cannon (at least, that's what I think it would feel like to be shot out of a cannon). My regular car is a Shelby Mustang, and the Tesla is much quicker. I'm told the chassis has 22 moving parts, with no oil changes, timing belt changes, spark plugs, etc. If only I could afford one.
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