Brooders.net

Spotted these Max Headroom episodes in this piece Egad! Max Headroom!. There are a heap of Max Headroom episodes available at Youtube.

Seems legitimate, as they are uploaded by ZDTV.

This was a great show. As Alun said

The future usually dates badly but the view of dystopia is as relevant now as it was in 1984

I remember watching this in the 80’s thinking this stuff was far out. I have watched some episodes recently, the undertones and concepts are still hard cyberpunk.

Scott Adams of “Dilbert fame spoke about his Good News Day. Having been afflicted with Spasmodic Dysphonia has limited his ability to speak. Anway .. he’ll explain better.

I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia.
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The weirdest part of this phenomenon is that speech is processed in different parts of the brain depending on the context. So people with this problem can often sing but they can’t talk. In my case I could do my normal professional speaking to large crowds but I could barely whisper and grunt off stage. And most people with this condition report they have the most trouble talking on the telephone or when there is background noise. I can speak normally alone, but not around others. That makes it sound like a social anxiety problem, but it’s really just a different context, because I could easily sing to those same people.

This sounds pretty freaky.

I never really thought about what part of the brain you use to sing, speak publically, hold conversation or any other utterance. More amazingly is how he ended up training his brain to readjust. Considering that his doctor stated that no one recovers from this condition, this an interesting outcome.

Rhyme was a context I hadn’t considered. A poem isn’t singing and it isn’t regular talking. But for some reason the context is just different enough from normal speech that my brain handled it fine.
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It was effortless, even though it was similar to regular speech.
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Then something happened.
My brain remapped.

My speech returned.

While this isn’t quite as amazing as The guys whose brain rewired after 20 years in a coma, it still seems to indicate (not with a huge statistical base) that the brain can be retrained to work. I’m just an interested amateur in this stuff, I am just intrigued that these kind of phenomena occur.

This is pretty cool.

Google’s Customised search engine allow you to add a customised search engine to your site, and specify which sites to search.

The search below only searches this site. I can add other sites I like as well. Try it out .. this one will only search Brooders.net, which is what I have also put in the Search section.

They also have a toolbar button so you can add sites or pages to your search engine that you like.

It’s really easy. It took less than 10 minutes to set it up (I already have a google account). It was also really easy to set it up to use google Adsense (I also have an account for this).

This should enable smaller sites to really quickly integrate a saerch engine.

All in all, I am really impressed. Google give you the ability to customise “look and feel” as well as which sites to search.

Every so often Marvin Minksy’s name comes up in relation to Artificial Intelligence. It’s on my AI todo list, check out his work, buy his book “Society of Mind“, etc.

I stumbled upon a quote from him:

“No computer has ever been designed that is ever aware of what it’s doing; but most of the time, we aren’t either.”

This intersects my thoughts about AI. We don’t really know what our brain is doing or how to be able to implement that in worse hardware (e.g. Chips versus Brain).

How things work is often a mystery because it’s hardwired in us somewhere. We don’t really think about the rules of language to use language, we don’t think about which muscles are contracting when we walk, nor do we think about digesting food after we’ve eaten. I guess that’s what makes AI hard to implement, because we think it’s easy because we don’t have any trouble doing things. Yet we don’t know the how or can’t articule it, which means it’s hard to build that into an extremely structured system.