It’s the Weekend!!!

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NASA is bracing for “seven minutes of terror,” when an unmanned craft landing on Mars may wake a dormant robot army that could rise up to invade and crush our civilization… oh, wait. They’re saying the space ship might tip over. That’s all.

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Spent most of the day shopping for a new couch and a new bed – found the bed we wanted at a decent price – we pick it up tomorrow, and our old bed goes to the blue house for storage. We have a new Queen Size pillow top marshmallow (but firm) – feels good at the store – can’t wait to try it at home.

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Gaming in my brain –

Next game I want to pick up is Hive. (with the mosquito ) I like the insect theme and bakelite tiles a lot – I’ll have to see if Aardvark can order it for us.

Unlike the US government, Hasbro lets you print out your own Monopoly money. There are PDFs for 1,5,10,20,50,100, and 500 dollar bills.

Good for any money-handling game, really. Witch Trial comes immediately to my mind. (which uses our monopoly money more than monopoly does)

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From New Scientist Tech: (or, a better use of a Newt/Pye cam?)

To try and develop a more sophisticated model, the team recorded the responses of 49 individual neurons in a part of a cat’s brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). The LGN receives and processes visual information from the retina, via the optic nerve, before sending it on to the cerebral cortex.

The data made it possible to build a software model of the LGN that can approximate how the neurons would respond to real scenes. The model was tested against scenes recorded from a “catcam” camera attached to a cat’s head.

“We chose the catcam because it was the most natural stimulus we could think of, the closest to what a cat would see when walking around,” Matteo Carandini told New Scientist. Because the catcam footage lacked elements moving independently from the rest of the scene, the researchers also used a scene from Disney’s animated film Tarzan.

The model’s predictions proved to be 80% accurate when shown artificial scenes, but this figure fell to 60% with the natural scenes or the Tarzan movie.

The ultimate goal of the research, still years distant, is to develop an implant that uses visual data to directly stimulate the LGN of blind people whose optic nerve or retina has degenerated from lack of use.

“For these people, a prosthesis in the eye doesn’t help,” Carandini explains. Only people who have recently become blind can benefit from such implants – currently being tested in humans – that stimulate the retina or optic nerve

Work on monkeys last year showed it is possible to stimulate the LGN using electrodes to alter their vision, something previously thought impossible. Software models like that developed by Carandini and colleagues would be vital for an implant to stimulate the right neurons to create a mental impression of vision.

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1 year ago – birth control, thursday, Catching up with TD, good stuff, gp and kat vanishment

2 years ago – man-bear, joker laughs, day off, but on call, if meme

3 years ago – Simple short film expressing life and death, first auto-post, bears, MP calls me, zombies, rapture, flip top box, cannibal, birthday meme, RIP Thurl Ravenscroft, 6 questions meme

4 years ago – robo-scotto, LLAP-Goch, arms, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, Fire Cracker Labels, freaky man-made island, bro

5 years ago – yale bombing, kiwano, doodle fizzles, D & I in There

6 years ago – dead picture trail links, bad dreams, re: pus jars, long weekend, train and bus smells, wondering what sci-fi geeks will watch with Buffy and x-files gone. Hm… I guess smallville is it? I don’t watch much regular TV, ikkyu poem, ARQuake.

7 years ago – blue rosebuds, gnomon, Herman the human mole, word association, evil news, scottsquatch returns, jelly jack, Joel gorilla

8 years ago – my first user icon – ,Heather outs Alex as a cheater and a bisexual (remember kids, post something publicly on the net, and the world can see it, even people you know.)