This is Tech

As I get older, it seems that the weeks, months and years go by faster each year.  I think this is a fairly common experience and occasionally ponder why this is.

One theory is that as you get older, you settle into a more standard routine.  My months don’t vary as much from month to month as they did when I was younger.  As interesting as my job is, I spend most of my days in the same chair, in the same room in front of the same computer.  As a kid my days were a bit more unpredictable.  Do young people have more milestones to mark the passage of time?  More unique experiences to remember?

Perhaps at the end of each day, your mind compresses your memories for storage? If you have worked with video compression, you know that video that doesn’t change much from frame to frame compresses better than video with lots of motion.  Maybe when you look back the last year, your brain adds up your unique memories and estimates how much time has passed based on the amount of compressed data.

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If you have any alternative theories or disagree that time perception changes with age, let me know in the comments.

I get pumped up when I think about the future of biotech. My hope is that biotech will evolve in the same way that computing did in the 70’s. Like computer equipment was in the 70s, biotechnology equipment today is expensive and only available to a small number of people. As the equipment drops in price, and becomes more accessible, it opens the door for home-brew biotech. We can only hope that the biotech equivalent of Hewlett and Packard or Jobs and Wozniack will emerge from their garages with breakthroughs that democratize and popularize biotechnology innovation.

Check out this article from io9.com describing the emergence of the BiYBio Club in Cambridge, Mass. If the Seattle, Bay Area and San Diego biotech markets are watching, they should start encouraging and supporting this kind of organization in their own backyards. Consider what the Palo Alto technology market would look like today without the benefit of a few smart people working out of the garages.
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Thanks to Ted at Yaicha, for posting this article following up on the recent coverage by Yaicha and others of Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED Talk. Taylor’s speech about her stroke and the vantage it gave her on the inner-workings of her mind is engaging. We posted an embedded video of her talk last month. I didn’t realize that Taylor had written a book, but based on her Ted Talk, I will be picking up a copy soon.

Yaicha article links to a New York Times Article expanding on the concepts discussed in Taylor’s TED Talk, and a link to her book, My Stroke of Insight, at Amazon. If you haven’t seen her original TED Talk, check it out here. And check out Yaicha for this and other interesting posts.

Photo by: Krischall

• Neuroscientist argues that today’s technology may be altering our brain chemistry for the worse
• Engineers at Caltech are developing a technique involving tiny robots inserting and arranging electrodes into our brain tissue to facilitate connecting our brains to computers. (Via Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends)
• The Brain Loop is a brain-to-computer interface device developed by the Graz Institute of Technology in Austria. Check out the demonstration video below, complete with wonderfully eerie computer generated narration. (Via InsideRIA)

The dancer in this optical illusion can be seen spinning clockwise or counterclockwise depending on the viewer’s perspective. Some say that the one you see is indicative of which side of your brain is dominant. I saw the dancer spinning clockwise, and it took me a while to get the direction to flip. The key to getting the picture to flip is focusing on the center foot. Once you see the rotation of the foot change the rest of the picture will follow.

The NYT article below discredits the theory that the picture can indicate whether you are right-brained and creative, or left-brained and logical. What do you think? (more…)

Last week Wired magazine published an in-depth article profiling the creator of a learning software application called SuperMemo. The concept for this software is that memorization and learning is achieved through repetition, but that the ideal time to refresh your memory about something is as close as possible to when you about to forget it. Apparently, research has shown that reviewing material at the right time significantly increases retention. This is referred to as the Spacing Effect.

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Wired.com is running an interesting set of articles on hacking your brain for maximum effect. One of the topics they cover is a list of potential brain enhancing drugs, some legal, some not. This topic has been getting some attention lately as the tech corollary to doping in sports. Check out an excerpt from the grid below, or the full grid at link # 5 below.

Here is a quick list of the twelve articles and links. Enjoy:

1) Max Your Mind’s Performance by Distracting Yourself;

2) Caffeinate With Care: Small Shots Do a Brain Better Than Big Blasts;

3) Feed Your Mind With Impressive Information;

4) Think Positive, and You Will Get Smarter;

5) Give Your Intellect a Boost - Just Say Yes to Doing the Right Drugs!;

6) How to Juice Your IQ Score;

7 ) Thalamus, Cortex, Amygdala … Pick Apart the Brain;

8 ) Don’t Panic. It Makes You Stupid;

9) Embracing Chaos Could Bring Order to Your Money;

10) Take on Any Map by Getting Visual;

11) Up Your Intelligence by Choosing Your Exercise Wisely;

12) Comprehension Climbs When You Sloooow Dooown.

Disclaimer: I don’t recommend faking an illness to get drugs.

Thanks to Anthony Stevens at The Pursuit of a Life for bringing this free e-book download to my attention. Looks like an interesting read, and will make a nice addition to the growing library on my Amazon Kindle.

Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a high-level statement of what needs to be done. Using ideas from natural evolution, GP starts from an ooze of random computer programs, and progressively refines them through processes of mutation and sexual recombination, until high-fitness solutions emerge. All this without the user having to know or specify the form or structure of solutions in advance. GP has generated a plethora of human-competitive results and applications, including novel scientific discoveries and patentable inventions

(Via The Pursuit of a Life.)

Wired Science posted a well written and interesting article yesterday about some up and coming cancer treatments.

The following is a short excerpt from the article with an overview of five emerging cancer treatments. For the full article and information about the companies that are working on this stuff, check out the article at Wired Science. (more…)