Over at his Bottom-up blog (safe for work) Cato scholar and CS PhD candidate Timothy B. Lee makes a case that we’ll *never* be able to copy the human brain in software. He argues that the human brain is too complex and living systems impossible to replicate via mathematics. (I categorize these kinds of articles as the “Sorry nerds, here’s why you’re wrong”, variety.)

While I’d be the first one to point out the futility of arguing whether or not we will or will not be able to do something, I have a little trouble with his arguments (in a later post I’ll offer my own argument as to why it might be a bigger challenge than we realize).

“You can’t emulate a natural system because natural systems don’t have designers, and therefore weren’t built to conform to any particular mathematical model.”

Natural systems like physics and chemistry don’t have designers and we emulate those every day. Our ability to emulate them increase all the time. Starting from the middle ages when we had a very incorrect and non-empiracle view of these things, to today where we’re able to run simulations of what happens inside of atoms and at the point of the big bang.

An airplane wing works a lot like a bird wing in glide and we fly millions of miles everyday on a mechanical emulation of that living system.

Since brains are made of atoms, unless there’s some magical process going on that transcends physics, at some level you should be able to replicate a brain provided you have the right computational power. That computer could even be a jar of neurons (a method I don’t even think Lee considered).

At some point we’ll have computers with a greater number of virtual parts than the human brain. That’s the point that many think we’ll be able to replicate the brain. Knowing what and how to replicate it will be a challenge of course. We’re still figuring out how to make virtual proteins…

Following the graph of computational power over the last decade shows us that we’re nearing a point where the raw power should be possible.

To further make his point, Lee uses weather prediction as an example:

“Weather simulations, for example, are never going to be able to predict precisely where each raindrop will fall, they only predict general large-scale trends, and only for a limited period of time.”

Lee confuses a simulation for a predictive system. I can make a very simple program in just a couple lines of code that will predict with 100% accuracy the probability of a coin toss. It won’t tell you the outcome of a specific coin toss, but its results would be indistinguishable from any particular coin toss and no system could tell the difference between my virtual toss and a real one.

A replicated brain is going to have its own experience from its point of inception and be just as subject to chaos as weather, coins and other brains. It’s going to be no more confined to Newtonian physics than any living system. The fact that it behaves differently than the brain it copied is no more disproof of its utility than the fact that identical twins develop different thought patterns.

He makes his point further by saying that you can’t reduce neurons to transistors. And because they’re different, the difference between a computer and brain is too vast to bridge.

As I mentioned earlier, Lee seems to ignore entirely the premise of just creating a computer out of actual neurons. We can do that to a small degree today. There’s no reason to think that it can’t scale. Obviously a bunch of unstructured neurons are not the same as a living human brain, but the fundamental parts are similar and that’s a good start.

I think the biggest problem Lee has with this is in seeing a computer and a brain as a one-to-one analogy where the aforementioned transistors act as neurons. This of course would not work. A human neuron has way more complexity than a simple logic gate. That plus the other parts of the brain we’re just grasping their function, make it a complex task. Nobody is saying that it isn’t.

What AI researchers and people interested in the Singularity believe is that a living system isn’t irreducibly complex. At some level it’s made of the same kinds of atoms as everything else. And starting from that point you can write software that emulates the function of molecules, proteins and even cells. From there (giving enough computational power) you can replicate living systems. Brains should be no different.

The Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France is the subject of a new documentary by Werner Herzog called Cave of Forgotten Dreams. The cave was discovered in 1994 and is filled with cave paintings that date back from 26,000 to 32,000 years ago. There is a chamber at the end of the cave, 1312 feet underground, that is filled with CO2 and radon gas that is said to cause hallucinations. These hallucinations are reflected in the paintings on the walls.

A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may be linked to the hallucinations. The trip is such that some archeologists think that it had a ritual nature, with people transcending into a new state as they descended into the final room.

[Gizmodo]

The recent floods in Australia have provided new hunting ground for bull sharks. Recently, two bull sharks have been spotted swimming past the McDonald’s restaurant in Goodna.

“It’s definitely a first for Goodna, to have a shark in the main street.”

“It would have swam several kilometres in from the river, across Evan Marginson Park and the motorway,” Cr Tully said.

[The Chronicle]

Technological advancement moves in strange ways. It’s often the technologies that come from just outside our mainstream field of vision that change things the most radically.

The properties of semiconductors were well known decades before anybody thought they’d be a great way to shrink vacuum tubes into transistors and then microchips. The implications of a really big network where everybody you know is plugged into it with PCs and mobile devices was a hard concept for anybody to fathom.

I’d like to tell you about a technology on the horizon that could be bigger than anything else we’ve seen before and make possible all sorts of crazy things like Doctor Who-like Tardis boxes that are bigger on the inside, matter replicators and line-of-sight teleportation.

It’s a technology that’s already been proven in small forms in the laboratories and now faces the challenge of finding out if it can scale without ridiculous amounts of energy.

The concept began with a theory by Satyendra Nath Bose and Albert Einstein about what happens when matter gets really, really cold. Quantum physics informs us that we can never know the precise position and velocity of a particle. This means the more you know about one, the less you can know about the other. If you slowed down a particle enough and looked at it under some special microscope it would look like a blur. The act of slowing it down means that its exact position has to become literally fuzzy.

In laboratories we can see this fuzziness by creating a Bose-Einstein condensate; a bucket of atoms supercooled to the point that they behave like one uber-atom and quantum effects are magnified. One of the cool applications of this is the atom laser (it’s called a laser even though it’s not made of light).

An atom laser works by using a Bose-Einstein condensate to cool a group of atoms and then using a technique like magnetic fields or an actual laser to propagate (emit) the matter in some kind of beam. In the image you can see what a beam of sodium atoms looks like when emitted from a magnetic trap.

The potential for this is immense. It’s very much in its infancy and hard to tell what will actually become of it, but when you can reliably get matter to behave like light, amazing things are possible.

An awesome particle beam
You could use this to create an incredibly powerful particle beam that would be even more precise than a laser and create smaller microprocessor components and be used to etch out things like nano-scale devices out of solid matter.

Tardis boxes
The fact that you can change matter’s position to such an indeterminate state means that you could theoretically have two particles in the same space. This could allow for matter compression where you could squeeze a large amount of matter into a confined area. Like Doctor Who’s Tardis, this would give a box that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Keeping molecules and complex structures from falling apart would be very big challenge however.

Teleportation
The ability of a matter laser to “project” beams of atoms means that a form of line-of-sight teleportation is theoretically possible. The image of the atom laser above shows a kind of crude form of that. If you could contain the beam over long distances through some other means or use a matter equivalent of a fiber optic cable, you could shoot atoms at near the speed of light from one point to another. At the receiving end the atoms are returned to a high temperature and reassembled, er somehow (see below).

Matter replicator
A Bose-Einstein condensate also makes interesting chemistry possible. You can cool down two different types of atoms and merge them to create molecules. You could theoretically do the same with an atom laser. Crossing beams could be used to create molecules and maybe even assemble more complex structures and build things out of scratch like the matter replicators on Star Trek.

It’s anybodies guess how far off any of these things are or even if they’ll ever happen in a way that makes it into day to day use. The biggest complications are often the unseen ones after you’ve proven what you thought was the most difficult part. That said, when the first laser was fired off in a laboratory, people could think of only a few applications for what was at that time an unwieldy technology. Decades later we can mass produce lasers for pennies apiece and use them in everything from Blue Ray players, to satellites to key chain toys.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom_laser
http://cua.mit.edu/ketterle_group/Animation_folder/Atom_laser.htm

Northwestern University scientists have have created a robotic fish (GhostBot) that mimics the swimming motions of the black ghost knifefish found in the Amazon. Ghostbot can move from swimming forward and backward to swimming vertically almost instantaneously by using a sophisticated, ribbon-like fin.

[Physorg.com]

One day you’re floating in your backyard above ground pool. Sipping on a Costco purchased pre-made margarita listening to C&C Music Factory. Life is good.

You head to sleep with dreams of another day of aquatic lounging splashing around in your head.

Wake up the next morning, slap on your trunks only to find an empty husk of pool sadly standing as a monument to disappointment in your backyard. All the water is gone, with no sign of a crack or a seam and all the surrounding grass dry as a whistle.

The solution for many who have had this problem? Aliens.

The phenomenon is explained in depth (no pun intended) on the Inexplicata blog. Interesting stuff.

[Inexplicata]

Imagine a tale of suburban terror in the Upstate New York town of Batavia in the Mad Men-era year of 1960.

Several youths report banshee-like screaming while crossing a town bridge. Days later the kids investigate and later tell authorities that they saw a gigantic hairy beast which left distinctive footprints. Although cops find the prints, there is no sign of the River Monster.

A few days later, the kids were busted as hoaxers. How did their plan fall apart? According to local paper The Daily News Online the kids got a little greedy.

City Hall officials found similar footprints made of white paint leading up to their front door on August 2nd. No one knows if they kids were looking to expose themselves as pranksters or genuinely thought they could convince the once-hookewinked authorities that the River Monster genuinely had business with the local government.

The footprints and impression left by the monster were also later debunked by a wildlife official after he realized the indentations were too deep to be created by an creature of reasonable size.

The lesson to future hoaxsters? Don’t push your luck, specifically if part of your plan is to insinuate a creature who lives amongst local marsh was trying to apply for a building permit.

Male splendid fairy-wrens flirt using fear and sing a special song each time they hear the call of one of their predators, the butcherbirds. Although this behaviour exposes their position and puts them in danger, it has been determined that this “vocal hitchhiking” on the predator calls is extremely useful for grabbing the attention of the ladies.

“We have shown that females do, in fact, become especially attentive after hearing butcherbird calls,” said Emma Greig, PhD, first author of the study and currently a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University. “So, it seems that male fairy-wrens may be singing when they know they will have an attentive audience, and, based on the response of females, this strategy may actually work!”

[Physorg.com]

I don’t know how this got by us in 2006, but apparently scientists have finally figured out what makes Rice Krispies snap, crackle and pop. It turns out that the fact that they’re made by frightening little Lebensborn demon elves has nothing to do with it and the crackling sound is *not* the burning cinders of hellfire like we were told by our older brother when we were 8.

There’s a scientific explanation involving science and possibly chemistry. You can read more here and explain it to us in the comments: What Makes Your Cereal Go Snap, Crackle and Pop

Researchers studying nine patients who survived swine flu during the H1N1 pandemic have noticed that they produced a wide range of antibodies that could be used to fight off other strains.

Currently they’re looking to see if they can use this to make a universal vaccine that could fight off any type of influenza – even the ones we’re most concerned about here on Weird Things:

We’ll keep our fingers crossed and hope it doesn’t give us an immunity to the bad-ass day walker virus.

BBC News

One man is on a mission to bring woolly mammoths back from the dead. A technique for successfully recovering frozen cells to use in creating clones was pioneered in 2008 by Dr. Teruhiko Wakayama, of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology.  Now Akira Iritani, a professor at Kyoto University, plans to use the results in a quest to bring the woolly mammoth back to life.

“Now the technical problems have been overcome, all we need is a good sample of soft tissue from a frozen mammoth,” he told The Daily Telegraph.

Professor Iritani estimates about 2 years to successfully implant an embryo into an elephant, followed by a 600-day gestation period.  He will be travelling to Siberia this summer in search of specimens.

[The Telegraph]

No one knows exactly why the sun rose roughly 48 hours ahead of schedule in the remote Greenland town of Ilulissat which like many arctic circle towns spends prolonged periods in total darkness.

Some say global warming has melted the ice caps that surround the town so far that the sun snuck over quicker.

However some have suggested a mischievous astronomical shift is to blame.

We are going to pin the blame on someone incorrectly programming the town’s only clock.

[Daily Mail]

The question of how the law should hand real life super heroes is a very interesting one. On one hand, they are mostly well-intentioned citizens who deter crime in a neighborhood. After all, if you were going to mug someone would you want to do it near the dude in a suit of molded rubber, or move a few blocks down the road. Then maybe while walking down the road you see a Little Caesars and totally agree to split a pizza. Then you forget about the mugging stuff whilst stuffing your face and laughing about the last episode of the Jersey Shore.

But on the other hand, tacitly approving vigilante justice can lead to situations like Phoenix Jones, who had his nose broken while being held at gunpoint last week.

A few of the Weird Things staff members (most notably Andrew Mayne whose production company produced the series) created an episode of G4 Underground about his very topic. You can check it out on iTunes.

[Boing Boing]

From PZ Meyer’s Pharyngula blog. Click through to see the full picture. This could, without alteration, be the cover of a metal album.

[Pharyngula]

Weighing in at over 6 billion times the mass of our solar system, astronomers have found the most massive black hole yet at the center of galaxy M87. Three times large than Pluto’s orbit, it’s very, very big.

Not to be outdone, chubby loving astronomers have their eyes on one that may even be even bigger than that one at 19 billion times the mass of our solar system. Woop woop.

Astronomers calculate mass of largest black hole yet