Via Pharyngula:
A SHORT COURSE ON SYNTHETIC GENOMICS
I haven’t watched these videos yet but they look good.
MIT Technology Review on mining data from social networks.
Interesting because I mentioned this a while back
Progress towards a tiny robot that can crawl through the human body
and just for fun…
If you are a total cable geek like me, you’ll [...]
Archive for July, 2009
Coffeebreak Links 310709
Posted in links, web on July 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Singularity Summit 2009
Posted in conferences, links, transhumanism on July 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
I’ll be attending the Singularity Summit this year.
Anyone who is interested in attending should register here:
The list of speakers looks something like this:
Randal Koene, Itamar Arel, Ben Goertzel, Stuart Hameroff, Ned Seeman, Jürgen Schmidhuber, Gary Drescher, David Chalmers, Ed Boyden, Marcus Hutter, William Dickens, Béla Nagy, Gary Marcus, Gary Wolf, Michael Nielsen, Robin Hanson, [...]
Man climbs building with vacuum gloves
Posted in humour, links on July 29, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Very cool! We have a building at the University with that same kind of metal cladding. I guess it would work on glass too, although the building would probably have to be clean and shiny.
Digital lab books
Posted in artsey, experimental insights, expt vs theory showdown, lifelogging on July 27, 2009 | 5 Comments »
Should I digitise my lab books?
The answer to this is almost definitely yes. Other than it taking a long time, there aren’t really any disadvantages to doing so. It would mean I had access to all my experimental settings in digital form, and I would have a built in cross-reference of the plots that are [...]
You won’t find dark energy in Josephson junctions either
Posted in expt vs theory showdown, links, superconductors on July 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Via ArXiv Blog:
An investigation (and rebuttal) of claims that it might be possible to interpret a component of the spectral noise in Josephson junctions as being due to the prescence of vacuum fluctuations:
Dark energy and Josephson junctions
Quite interesting…
Quantum Neural Networks 1 – the Superconducting Neuron model
Posted in BCI, RSFQ, feeling dumb, learnin' stuff, quantum computing, superconductors on July 20, 2009 | 12 Comments »
I’m interested in Quantum Neural Networks, specifically how to actually build the things. Any input would be greatly appreciated on this one. This is open notebook science in an extreme sense: I’m discussing here something I’d like to go into eventually, it may be several years down the line, but it’s worth thinking about it [...]
Lifelogging
Posted in lifelogging, links, transhumanism, web on July 19, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I’ve been looking into some options for life logging software recently. Evernote is one option.
However, I still have several reservations about using third party software for this task, similar to the objections raised here. I worry about loss of data, I worry about future-proofing, and I worry about privacy.
I’d like a system that had some [...]
It’s not cake but it’s close!
Posted in cake, cool physics, humour on July 16, 2009 | 2 Comments »
Here are some pictures of our Liquid Nitrogen Ice cream endeavours… mmm. Disclaimer: Don’t try this at home unless you have had training in handling cryogenic liquids
Ingredients: Cream, milk or that strange stuff we don’t have over here, sugar, crushed fruit, and liquid nitrogen. Recipe: Stir the sugar into the cream until it [...]
BlueBrain progress
Posted in BCI, web on July 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This is an awesome short video from Wall Street Journal covering some of the progress of the BlueBrain project.
If you get goosebumps thinking about the potential of this project, we’re on the same wavelength
Scientists Create Artificial Brain 7/13/2009
Meet Blue Brain, a “brain” made up entirely of silicon and housed inside an IBM supercomputer. [...]
Paper woes
Posted in learnin' stuff, research blogging on July 14, 2009 | 6 Comments »
I’m trying to write a journal paper. It’s really hard. It’s the first paper I’ve ever written. Even if it does not get published, it is very good practice. It would be good to be first author.
The paper is about using the experimental technique of switching measurements (aka Macroscopic Quantum Tunneling) to assess the quality [...]