sent2null space

A few days ago I was thinking about our brains amazing ability to switch focus on features within an incoming sensory data stream. It has always fascinated me when I probed it in a biological mind frame but I realized this morning after waking a new idea that may explain how attention is performed in the brain. The idea inspires this article now after I read a post by a friend on Facebook regarding the startled behavior of his cat when ever he takes the vacuum cleaner out of the closet. I realized in that example how my dream could explain its behavior. I assert that when we finally understand the mammalian brain fully we'll be able to prove that the cats brain has an unusually long attentional neuronal pathway. Recent research in the area of explaining how mammalian brains switch attention seems to implicate a critical role for glial cells in the process of allowing us to keep our attention on certain things in each of our sensory dimensions....for example, your ability to tun...

The annual black hat and defcon conferences are well known events where hackers and crackers of all types of systems come together to demonstrate their latest "exploits". These range from ways to snoop data or voice off of open cell or wifi networks to ways to modify the function of various hardware systems. In this years Defcon conference a team of hackers introduced some exploits of the computer systems inside a modern automobile. You can see a video of some of their results here , the interesting thing about hacking though that goes beyond the FUD generation that the media seems intent on producing by publishing such stories is that they aren't really that surprising. Engineering systems is about learning to cleverly use abstractions and functional encapsulation to built extremely complex systems. In object oriented programming the concepts of encapsulation are a fundamental aspect of good OO design principles and I've written extensively on these ideas in posts i...

A recent article indicated in a chart some serious issues facing the American economy specifically but the global economy in general. It focuses on the short term maximization that is the inherent pull for corporations and how that mantra leads businesses to take a relentless approach to cost cutting which includes cutting costs in terms of the salary and other compensation given to employees.  In a response to a thread started to discuss this article I posted the following that described again from some new angles why Action Oriented Workflow technology allows people to maximize their inherent value and work across their value landscapes. I felt it was worth transcribing into a formal blog post so here it is: What AOW does is it allows performance evaluation to be properly modulated by social cues only so much as needed to complete initiatives begun. Ideally merit and performance evaluation are linked 1 to 1 and the couple are linked to one simple concept "action", human...

Today is a special day to an army of internet geek followers, proud champions of the en vogue practice of putting up anything technical as something "awesome!" simply because it is technical and people that work in that space are cool for reasons that can't otherwise be distilled. Yet another day where I get to grit my teeth at the dozens of posts upholding the "unbelievable" genius of Nikola Tesla and how he's been so wronged by history. I am here to strike a contrarian chord.....Give it a rest. Tesla was indeed a great engineer, he devised some really cool technologies, alternating current and wireless transmission technologies being the two best by far....but he was only an engineer. The fact that he died penniless is direct indication of his lack of *grander vision* for the technologies he created and that's the most sad thing of all. The much maligned Thomas Edison was also an Engineer (contrary to what theoatmeal had to say about that tr...

A recent article on the singularity inside black holes supposes that maybe they are not each housing a singularity, a point of infinite density and this is an idea I've been partial two for a long time. For the following reasons which have a mathematical basis to them. Consider this, If I lived on an asymptotic curve that exists on both sides of the asymptote...I would never know there was an other side. I'd see the approach to the asymptote as properly infinite along the dimension of measure (in this case matter density) but I'd be wrong.... ditto kiddo. Our theories are ONLY estimations of the reality, the reality is continuous *even across asymptotic bounds* just like the pure mathematics that we use to capture those asymptotic curves. The history of physical discoveries is a sign of this, one revolution after another pointed out because infinity showed up where it shouldn't have in some theory.....leading us to realize that the *wrong math* was being used (Black b...

It appears that the brain is a uniquely connected set of statistical processing units(SPU), functional memory storage modules that are connected via neurotransmitter mediated API like interfaces. A statistical processing unit is a processing module that emerges from connecting memory elements that have the ability to modulate output based on input and feedback up chain from output line or lines. The neurons and glial cells exhibit these properties. In biology the action potential firing process encodes the varied information related from other contiguous neurons tasked with processing some bit of sensory information. neurotransmitters provide the API or application programming interface through which groups of neurons fire or process data in concert. Each functional module describes a set of neurons providing some processing function for a given sensory data set. The neo cortex of most mammals is separated into regions loosely devoted to processing data from the visual, auditory, soma...

In the series of posts I've been writing where I couch my analysis of the developing age of genetics in the form of hypothetical stories. I always wanted to create an illustration of precisely what it would be like for the people who become the first super mortals. What will the pattern of their chronological age or years of life look versus their genetic age as it is defined by the quality of their genetic information as it undergoes the degradation that is associated with the aging process? I always had the image in my mind but wanted to take some time to create an info graphic defining what most peoples lives will proceed as. Often the question has been asked "Will we be immortal" and that is ultimately the wrong question. Immortality inherently implies not only that one is impervious to death but that one is impervious to death precisely via the mechanisms of aging. This will never be the case for any human being living today and it is safe to say, that even for tho...