The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates | Hacker News Reader

The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates

scienceblogs.com

26 pointscwan9 comments

The title is wrong. The brain isn't more efficient than previously thought. The axonal propagation of action potentials is... but that means that the brain burns more glucose and lactate elsewhere (at the synaptic junction, if I understand Magistretti properly).

The other HN item (direct link to the New scientist entry) is much better.

Well I can't comment on the quality of the calculations he's talking about - but even the previous estimates of the power consumption of the brain were awe inspiring. The power consumption and stability against things like epilepsy are an important clue to how the thing works.

I wish people would stop talking about Deep Blue like it's still the state of the art. Rybka can consistently do better than 50/50 against any human player even running on a (reasonably modern/high-powered) commodity PC.

I assume this is the same as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817813

That's a tricky thing to protect against. You'd almost have to fetch all pages and do a content comparison a la google news to see what goes together.

This sort of mixup happens all the time.

And sometimes that's even good, when an interesting subject scrolls off the newpage before it receives any votes. Then a few days later someone will post the same news from a different source and suddenly it makes the homepage.

I agree that's it's not necessarily avoidable, and it's not necessary to avoid. I do think, however, that it's useful to cross-reference the items so people can read all the relevant comments.

Not everyone agrees, I occasionally get down-mud, and I'm not as anal about it as I once was. Waba Sabi, and all that.

Am I missing a joke here?

You posted this exact same comment (but linked to this page) in the page you link to.

Which one do you prefer?

It's not a joke, it's the same underlying story, but written by two different writers. They are, however, the same underlying story, so I thought anyone interested might like to compare and contrast the two articles. More, some might comment on one, others on the other, so it was worth cross-referencing them.

I have no preference, I'm trying to add value by creating connections, and preventing subsequent comment duplication.

Sure the news is the same, but Jonah Lehrer is probably the better writer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com