dewarrn1

A Bond villain.

This is a wonderful project. Many thanks to Jan for sharing it.

Separately, regarding dementia, it is both less and more complicated than many commenters suggest.

From UCSF Neuroscience’s excellent Memory and Aging Center resources:

“Dementia is a general term for any disease that causes a change in memory and/or thinking skills that is severe enough to impair a person’s daily functioning… There are many different types of dementia… Most types of dementia cause a gradual worsening of symptoms over the course of years due to progressive damage to nerve cells in the brain caused by the underlying disease process…” [0]

Even more briefly: dementia is an umbrella term, many diseases can cause dementia, and those diseases may or may not be progressive.

0: https://memory.ucsf.edu/what-dementia

Thanks!

I'll bite: what quantum things can they run on it? Or, what is its utility as a quantum computing device?

Or even non-hereditary information transmission methods...

McConnell, J. (1962). Memory transfer via cannibalism in planaria. Journal of Neuropsychiatry, 3, 1-42.

This is cool! We visited the Rijksmuseum while they were doing the photography: automated but still painstaking work.

Creators may disagree.

Interesting work. There are also clinical trials, recent and ongoing, looking at the effects of metformin on aging in humans, too, including the TAME trial[0].

[0]: https://www.afar.org/tame-trial

Thanks for sharing. I don't have the expertise to evaluate the claims, but it's certainly an interesting theory and a compelling story. Just wish he'd continued the presentation of his work.

This looks cool; I might wait for 1.0, but the idea of git underneath and something better on top is appealing.

Me, I picked Python and Mercurial for primary language and DVCS, respectively: one of those worked out really well. I still miss hg and have never really gotten the hang of git.

Regarding Mercurial, would you happen to have recommendations for a GitHub/Bitbucket-like service that still works with hg?

That's funny, I had thought that memristors were a solved problem based on this talk from a while back (2010!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKGhvKyjgLY, but I gather HP never really commercialized the technology. More recently, there does seem to be interest in and research on the topic for the reasons you and the GP post noted (e.g., https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05759-5).

The paper should definitely be more clear on this point, but there's a sentence in section 5.2.3 that makes me think that this was playable and played: "When playing with the model manually, we observe that some areas are very easy for both, some areas are very hard for both, and in some the agent performs much better." It may be a failure of imagination, but I can't think of another reasonable way of interpreting "playing with the model manually".

Yup, great example! Simons's lab has done some things along exactly these lines [0], too.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoMjORwA-4

I understand what you mean. I believe that the authors would contend that what you're describing is a typical attentional state for an awake/aware human: focused mostly on one thing, and with surprisingly little awareness of most other things (until/unless they are in turn attended).

Furthermore, even what we attend to isn't always represented with all that much detail. Simons has a whole series of cool demonstration experiments where they show that they can swap out someone you're speaking with (an unfamiliar conversational partner like a store clerk or someone asking for directions), and you may not even notice [0]. It's rather eerie.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWSxSQsspiQ&t=5s

Not exactly, but our representation of what's behind us is a lot more sparse than we would assume. That is, I might not be surprised by what I see when I turn around, but it could have changed pretty radically since I last looked, and I might not notice. In fact, an observer might be quite surprised that I missed the change.

Objectively, Simons and Chabris (and many others) have a lot of data to support these ideas. Subjectively, I can say that these types of tasks (inattentional blindness, change blindness, etc.) are humbling.

That's absolutely true. It's also well-established by Simons et al. and others that healthy normal adults maintain only a very sparse visual representation of their surroundings, anchored but not perfectly predicted by attention, and this drives the unattended gorilla phenomenon (along with many others). I don't work in this domain, but I would suggest that object permanence probably starts with attending and perceiving an object, whereas the inattentional or change blindness phenomena mostly (but not exclusively) occur when an object is not attended (or only briefly attended) or attention is divided by some competing task.

Great observation. And not entirely unlike normal human visual perception which is notoriously vulnerable to missing highly salient information; I'm reminded of the "gorillas in our midst" work by Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness#Invisi...

Fun to read and puzzle through. The detective's name called to mind Leblanc's Sherlock Holmes theft/fanfic as an antagonist for Lupin: Herlock Sholmes [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars%C3%A8ne_Lupin_versus_Herlo...

It's remarkable that this works, and it's equally remarkable that the authors succeeded using a (deliberately) naive approach with the fMRI data. I was just teaching the visual system to students over the last few weeks: cognitive neuroscience/neuropsychology can tell us a lot about what brain systems should be involved here. It's such a tempting research domain to dive into using a more sophisticated approach, but then again, maybe the authors' simpler data-driven method is a strength.

EEG recording is an alternative that would outlast the potential disease-related degradation of eye movements. Manny Donchin gave a brown bag at UIUC about the possibilities of using this approach to support communication by ALS patients many years ago. It's clever: they use the P300 marker to index attention/intention. I do not recall whether he and his colleagues ever commercialized the tech. I believe that this publication is representative: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinph.2005.06.027

In these discussions, I am always mindful that the two browsers have shared developer DNA (not to say code) from the inception of Google's offering: "Messrs. Brin and Page hired some Firefox developers who built a demonstration of Chrome. “It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind,” Mr. Schmidt said..." [0]

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20200805000248/https://blogs.wsj...

From the Verge's article (https://www.theverge.com/2021/11/10/22775580/kyle-rittenhous...):

“iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms,” the defense insisted. “It uses artificial intelligence, or their logarithms, to create what they believe is happening. So this isn’t actually enhanced video, this is Apple’s iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there,” they added.

I am reminded of a (probably apocryphal) story about a professor who refused to return a book to the university library: "Any student who wants to read this book, that's a student I want to meet."

These are not the IM protocols you seek.

On-topic, Pidgin remains great, I still install it on every new desktop, but I haven't fired it up in years. I suppose it's been displaced by Slack, more's the pity.

Imagined.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unincorporated_Man

*Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/four-seasons-...

It's a shame because they made such outstanding products at one time. I was given a Toshiba laptop as I headed off to college in 1995, and it still boots (to Windows 3.11) 25 years later.

Obligatory SR-71 story about going fast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AyHH9G9et0

I would be interested to know what others use. I have found that following other scientists on Twitter (i.e., crowdsourcing) is surprisingly effective.