Plectics:
Category: Evolution
Jen finds a story about a Swiss research group which made a little ecology of robots with neural-network brains and let their wiring be crafted by natural selection. The most entertaining line of the pop-science writeup: At intervals, the robots...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:56 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Bibliophilia
My meta-review of S. Eddy's book review in PLoS Biology leads me into familiar curmudgeon territory.
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:02 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
M. B. Kitzbichler et al. (2009). "Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization" PLoS Comput Biol 5, 3: e1000314. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314. Self-organized criticality is an attractive model for human brain dynamics, but there has been little direct evidence for its existence...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 5:03 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Plectics
The night before last, I fell asleep on the sofa in my home's art gallery. (How I ended up living in a place which has its own art gallery is a story for another day, as is the reason why...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:16 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Plectics
"... 1978 was the year when the U.S. ran out of excuses for bad economic policy and performance." — Time Magazine, "1979 Outlook: Recession" (25 Dec 1978)...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 11:51 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: arXiv
The following I file under "Why didn't I hear about these before I wrote a science-fiction novel?" Hunting the "chameleon particle" with spare parts from Swapfest Glider guns realized in chemical reactions (arXiv:0902.0587, to be published in Phys. Rev. E)...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 3:12 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have been informed that Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians (2007) is now available in audiobook format from Cherry Hill Publishing. Cherry Hill is now selling an eight-CD recording of the book read by the author, with a foreword by John...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:15 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I haven't yet seen the new The Day the Earth Stood Still movie. Generally speaking, I haven't been terribly speedy about seeing movies as they come out; sometimes, I just wait until they're available on mplayer. The reviews have not...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 9:18 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm currently staring at a heap of numbers and trying to make sense out of them. In lieu of substantive discourse from me, therefore, here are a few items I've recently enjoyed reading: Jonathan Shock explores the physics of rainbows...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 12:16 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Can physics tell us about ourselves? To phrase the question more narrowly: can the statistical tools which physicists have developed to understand the collective motion of large agglutinations of particles help us figure out what our brains are doing? If...
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Posted by Blake Stacey at 1:06 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks