randform

Together with collegues from London and Tokyo neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes did an experiment (however up to now only with 21 test persons as it seems), where a person had to choose wether he/she wanted either to add or to substract two numbers. And even before the test persons saw the numbers and before they started to compute it was possible – by using a MRI brain scan – to tell with a 70% chance, what kind of desicion the person was going to make, or in other words: using the MRI the scientists could “read the mind” of the test persons (with a 70% chance). Freely chosen decisions are usually happening in the prefrontal cortex.

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update 22.02.2011: the above image is a mashup of a photoshopped poster for the below referenced film starring at theatre Houdin from an unknown author and some fotoshopped rainbow colors from some astrophysics film.

In 1896 Georges Méliès produced with “Le manoir du diable” the first horror movie in film history. And even more this 2 minute stop-motion special effects film was also the first colour film in film history. The colouring in this film was done by hand on each single image. Colouring black and white films can be seen as a kind of “branding” . It actually took quite a time until it was possible to automatically color films with a -more or less- full color spectrum. This was achieved in 1932 with the Three-strip Technicolor process in the animation “Flowers and Trees”. The first colored feature film in film history was then “Becky Sharp” of 1935 displaying the typical bright technicolor colors.

I was always wondering why films and images of cosmological events like e.g. about the big bang or supernovae look as if they were shot in technicolor, although they were digitally processed.

The reason for this is that the unvisible light spectrum (and the brightness) gets transferred into a visible spectrum via a human interference:
-> Where do those images come from

While we all await the total lunar eclipse (here in europe at least), astronomy picture of the day has a solar eclipse video from STEREO B, one of the two solar examination space observatories (guess how the other is called!).

For all of us who can expect to have a cloudy sky tonight (the moon will enter the deepest shadow about 22:30 MEZ) I made a look-alike illustration of what to expect: scattered light from earth will dye the moon red.

a little comment on materials, matter and their perception. artwork by Uta Naumburg:
->chronos chromos concrete

signpost at FEZ
The FEZ Berlin a children, youth and family centre (actually the largest in Europe) is one of the jewels of Berlin. FEZ-Berlin is run as a non-profit organisation of the Land Berlin and is divided into three main components: the educational work with children, youth and families, the Berlin State Music Academy and the indoor and open air pools.
It was originally founded in 1950 as the Pionierrepublik „Ernst Thälmann“.

For the educational work it hosts among others an ecology garden, a kids museum, a real kids train, which dates back to 1956 and the Orbitall -a space exploration centre for kids dating back to 1979. With various activities like e.g. the space camp mission kids get prepared for the future.

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…when they finally managed to get the cooling for those quantum computers portable… (image © timh)

After all the hype with the iphone (or whatever its name is / was / will be) one has to look for the next gen smartphone hype. A candidate could be a cellular powered by a quantum computer. However if you look for something to adopt in the near future the linux smart phone Neo1973 might be something for you.

A Blochsphere from Wikipedia. Mathematicians call this often CP^1.

Last Tuesday saw the announcement of D-Wave, which gave a demonstration on their World’s First Commercial Quantum Computer. There will be a second demonstration today at the Telus World of Science in Vancouver, Canada.

The first application of their Orion quantum computing system demo is a pattern matching application applied to searching databases of molecules. The second is a third-party planning/scheduling application for assigning people to seats subject to constraints. However it is designed to solve the two dimensional Ising model in a magnetic field.

->more on the demo announcement website by Geordie Rose the CTO of D-wave.

->some technical papers for interested folks

For the readers convinience Scott Aaronson of Shtetl-Optimized also hands out
“The Orion Quantum Computer Anti-Hype FAQ”.

image from wikipedia

Sometimes sun light protection with simple and energy saving solutions like exterior window shutters or non electric mechanical window blinds (see above image) is not so easy feasible like in the case of big windows, like in business applications or in urgent cases, where a fast shield is necessary like e.g. in aviation.

An alternative to electro-mechanical (and thus energy costly) window blinds (in german also called Jalousie) are may be smart windows like e.g. the SPD light-control technology by research frontiers Inc. who seem to head for a big commercalization of their product see pressrelease from Feb 1.

->see also the information brochure by frontier research.

stelarc is an australian artist who investigates the man-machine evolutionary step with his own body. He was giving a lecture yesterday at the transmediale.

Since nobody was responding on the ticketphone for transmediale I just went there. Luckily I guessed right that the location “@studio” on the transmediale website meant the west berlin academy of art and not the east berlin academy of art. However the lecture was apparently already sold out at noon. There were quite a bit of people which came from foreign countries and who like me didn’t manage to extract the right information from the transmediale website.

So I looked at the closing doors and how people were talking to each other in the lounge and went.

->stelarc’s fractal flesh

As I tried to explain in my previous posts it is not so sure, wether mankind will ever reach the posthuman state or any other condition at all. And yes it is hard to comunicate why scientists see so much evidence for not reaching that state due to the climate change , if they fail to do a good weather forecast for more than 3 days. However the two things are different and may be it is at the moment more convincing to look at the number of scientists who warn TODAY.