A slice of shark brain with lemon

Politics fatigue. The US election is over and all the politics podcasts and news have lost their bite. Hillary as foreign minister, so what? The economy tanking, who cares? Keith Olberman's attempts to sound as excited about the political news now as he did before the election are off key and Democracy Now won't stop heaping shit on not-even-president-yet Obama. But even Obama is boring now. Another 'stimulus package', wake me up in a month or two, seriously, who gives a shit? (And all the while Israel is starving Gaza.. that still lights a spark somewhere, but is it being discussed? nooo, course not. Because, to paraphrase Obama; 'that shit is sacrosanct'.. yea he actually used that word.. right before bringing Rham Emanuel on board.. but I digress....)

So that's half my podcasts rendered impotent, half my daily entertainment gone. And to top it all Entitled Opinions go on hiatus. Shit. Post-election, post-SfN blues. Even Twit has lost it's umpf.

So, back to basics. Back to work. Think of the absence of distractions as an opportunity to take a closer look at what I'm working on. An intelligent circuit. A biologically inspired circuit. Biologically inspired circuit design.

Sooner or later we all come up against network theory. We all need large data-sets for strong patterns to emerge, but then the variables are too many and the maths are too hard. For this we need intelligent circuits.

NASA knows this. NASA even uses an artificial neural network to handle the plants they're bringing to Mars. But it's unlikely that it's a network modeled on a biological circuit. We don't have programs like that, not yet.

Tribute to the best cop-show ever made

Attention-allocation in open real-time communication and neural networks

One of the many reasons I follow Steve Gillmor's work is that his interest, it seems to me, is in attention-allocation, which is also my interest. How can we discover and attend to those bits of information that, were we aware of their existence, would be of highest quality to us? Attention-allocation is a fundamental problem in all adaptive behaviour of course, but it has to be thoroughly re-imagined in relation to the internet in general - as Google did - and open, real-time communication in particular - which appears to be what Steve is doing.

What is the best way to discover and filter information online? Open, real-time messaging services like Twitter, Identi.ca, FriendFeed and (sooner or later) Google Reader offer two solutions: friends and track. A 'friend' here is anyone whose activities and recommendations you find sufficiently interesting to follow indiscriminantly, be they IRL friends, a Mars rover or unnamed members of a common-interest group on FriendFeed. A 'track' is a word the use of which you find sufficiently interesting to follow indiscriminantly: I use TwitterSpy and IdenticaSpy to have gTalk alert me whenever words like dopamine, serotonin and chrisharris are used in a conversation anywhere on Twitter (some delay) or Identi.ca (instantly). FriendFeed, we are told, will soon enable track on its network, and all three networks are growing fast.

As the aim of my own work in electrophysiology is to understand and model how neural networks achieve intelligent attention-allocation, the question inevitably arises: how do these two forms of attention-allocation relate? Do neurons have friends? Do they track? Nervous systems use dopamine, a scalar signal that increases signal-to-noise and promotes memory formation, to self-organize and allocate attention. Could a similar signal be implimented in open, real-time messaging networks?

  

Equilibrium potential

How is this 'financial crisis' not simply the emergence of real globalization? The West, particularly the US, has over the last few centuries amassed and generated most of the world's capital and information, but constitute only a small portion of its total population. With the emergence of the internet over the last ten years however, capital and information has started flowing freely between countries. Will this wealth not naturally, inevitably redistribute toward an equilibrium that more accurately reflects the geographical distribution of the world's population? BRIC growth may have slowed during the 'crisis' but it has certainly not stopped. China continues to fund US national debt. I understand that it's a sensitive question but is the West, particularly the US, about to be severely humbled, or is there something in Western culture that entitles its members to a life-style that, were it enjoyed by every person in the world, would require five planets? The West, after all, produced the scientific revolution that underpins its ever-rising living standards. The West also embraces an openness that continues to attract and innovate.

Swedish Google presents: gTalk with voice and video :)

Aging

It's time for the fifth edition of Hourglass, a blog carnival about the biology of aging, hosted this time on Laura's blog: psique.

Those of us who study neuroscience know that there is no life after death. We are acutely aware of the delicate structure of consciousness. We know that even the agnostic creed "I don't know what will happen to me when I die" is as misguided as belief in a flat Earth. We know. I'm sorry to disappoint you but we really do know now. It is not a mystery. After death your mind shuts down, permanently.

Some of us are OK with this. Some of us point out that once we're dead we won't know it, so what's to fear? I am not one such person. I do not want to get old, and I do not want to die. I want to survive, and I want those I love to survive.

So I applaud the new generation of biogerontologists who want to extend life indefinitely. I applaud stem cell research, personalized medicine, nanotech, and blog carnevals about the biology of aging. Advances in medicine and medical technology continue to reduce blood-pressures, patch up hearts, extract cancers and extend life expectancy worldwide, and nothing could be more important. But only a transhumanist would be so naive as to feel safe that "somehow" science will save us; that technological progress is "likely" to save those of us who are alive today from annihilation. Know, please, that it is not just a handful of diseases threatening you; not just a few potential cancers eating away at your heart. What you're up against is entropy itself, and as soon as that first blood vessel pops you'll find out just how immature our medical science really is.

This is at the core of the iPlant. I know the plan is drastic, I know that. But I don't want to die, and you probably don't want to die, and it seems to me, just seems to me, that the only way we'll have a realistic hope of surviving is by commitment and organization on a mass scale. Everyone - two, four, maybe eight hours of monotonous research every week. That is how we have to approach the problems and possibilities highlighted in this Hourglass carneval. That's how we survive.

Some notes

By the time Obama leaves office (2016) a lot of conservative baby boomers will have died, and the US electorate will be more ethnically and culturally mixed. Unless the Obama administration screws up in some major way (e.g. the relations they form or fail to form with Russia, China and South America) it is hard to see how republicans could recover their previous dominance. Maybe the next turning point will be bioethics - at what point in the development of new biotechnologies do people decide that the liberal slope is getting too slippery; at what point do we start hearing unanimous calls to ban transhumanism; at what point does biotechnology become the new abortion/gay marriage? Maybe it never gets to that point, but i sure wonder what Obama's bioethics council will look like..

In other Obama related news: the roundtable on today's Democracy Now is soberingly critical of his foreign policy, particularly regarding Israel and Afghanistan.

President-Elect Barack Obama

Psst.. want a Stewart?