Philibuster

Now something very interesting here is this.

“Eugene Izhikevitch [a mathematician at the Neurosciences Institute] and I have made a model with a million simulated neurons and almost half a billion synapses, all connected through neuronal anatomy equivalent to that of a cat brain. What we find, to our delight, is that it has intrinsic activity. Up until now our BBDs had activity only when they confronted the world, when they saw input signals. In between signals, they went dark. But this damn thing now fires on its own continually. The second thing is, it has beta waves and gamma waves just like the regular cortex—what you would see if you did an electroencephalogram. Third of all, it has a rest state. That is, when you don’t stimulate it, the whole population of neurons stray back and forth, as has been described by scientists in human beings who aren’t thinking of anything.

In other words, our device has some lovely properties that are necessary to the idea of a conscious artifact. It has that property of indwelling activity. So the brain is already speaking to itself. That’s a very important concept for consciousness.”

HOLY FREAKING CRAP! WOW! This is crazy in ways that I can hardly convey while busy at work. DO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT HE JUST SAID? and what it means? also what it does not mean?

They reproduced a cat’s brain in a computer neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. Which, is a huge amount of work I imagine. Probably only a little less than doing it one by one. This isn’t anything new really, they have been making models of brains or parts of brains and then feeding it questions or whatever and seeing how the neurons fire and then comparing it to real working brains under a cat scan. I’m sure that data was useful in designing this model brain. I’ve seen the pictures of these models. A ton of multi color lines tracing out the patterns different information traveled through the connections. Looks pretty cool but normally after the question is answered it just sits there not doing anything. Like a computer, ask a question give a command, get activity. Even in your computer’s rest state it has a ton of commands and things for it to be doing so it’s always active but this is different because there was firing between the neurons. Things going on without being programmed to do so by the people running this test. AGAIN I can not explain how amazing that is.

It is not true AI, the brain model is not a thinking entity right now, but it is getting very close. Via Cosmic Variance

Spirit seems to be stuck on a rock or in loose soil right now. They are deciding on what to do about it by maybe running some tests on the other rover. Hopefully they’ll be able to get the thing moving again.

The Sun, while as stupid as it is, has an article I thought good. It’s completely self serving so I won’t be taking apart their “study” method. IT workers are apparently better in bed than most other professions. Hey I’m into IT stuff, total geek, and it’s not news to me that geeks are good in bed. I’ve been saying this forever, cause well I’m a geek. I just wish that well chicks would realize this beforehand instead of being so surprised afterwards. It would help with the second part of that survey, the part that doesn’t fit me, IT workers are the third most likely to have sex 3 or more times a week. Yeah I wish.

Alright I’ve uploaded pictures to my facebook and myspace but I forgot about here. So here are some photos of my new car. 1993 325i convertible.

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So I just bought another car off ebay. I’m tired of the kia I’m driving right now. It’s decided that it’s new goal is to annoy me as much as it can without completely breaking. Ever since I got the car the front right headlight has been burning out. I’ve replaced it about 4 times in two years. The radio has been a major pain in the butt. It never really worked all that well. The lights would go out on it and sometimes you couldn’t control the volume. Then it decided to really mess up and just not turn on and when I pushed the power button a little harder than normal the thing fell out. Showing me that it was never really mounted correctly. I decided to try and fix it by putting in a computer in place of the radio. Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I even have all the parts I just have to install everything. I got cold feet about it when I started seeing how bad the electrical problems with this car are. Without the radio the dashboard light don’t work. Behind the radio are two different wiring harnesses one that wasn’t being used (The stock harness I guess) and the one that was attached to the radio. I figured Ok well so this was attached to the radio and my dash lights worked so two or more wires from this are used for them. I can rule out the speaker wire lines and I know which is power ground etc so I’ll just connect the right wires together to complete the circuit that is broken without the radio. Nope no go. No combination of wires not including the speaker wires would get the dash lights back on. Except for a couple combinations with the old wire harness which again wasn’t connected to anything before the radio fell out.

I rigged up a method that brought the dash lights back. But only on one side. and only if you don’t have high beams on. I couldn’t get them to work. Oh well. So I’ve been riding around without a radio just a gapping hole in the dash because I don’t want to deal with the wiring problems that I’ll have when installing the computer and of course the dash lights will probably stop working once I have the computer working.

There is a CV joint going bad by the sound of it. Every time I go over a speed bump the thing bangs like I’ve run over something. Nearly made me drop a deuce the first time it happened.

Don’t get me started on changing the oil. I have never been successful in removing the oil drain plug in this car. I stripped the bolt the first time I tried and had to get a stronger friend with a super long vice grip to get it off. Alright so now I put on a different new plug. Come next oil change nope not coming off. So again it has a stripped bolt. It’s also leaking oil but in this case it makes it easier for me I just keep topping it off. Oh and before you even begin yes I’m turning the bolt the right way. But hell I even tried the other way as well. It’s not moving under 1 Phil power, and I’m not a weak guy. Not super strong either but still it’s a FREAKING OIL PLUG! It shouldn’t require that much force.

After all of this the car decided it wasn’t annoying me enough so it decided to revoke my ablitly to change from defrost to floor to straight at you. It just randomly switches from defrost to floor or whatever whenever it feels like it. The next thing to go will probably be the temperature control.

Well too bad it won’t get that far. I’m going to get rid of it now that I have a new car lined up. I decided a day or two after the air con control problem sprung up that I was going to buy a new car. Well, not a new car, just another car new to me. I don’t have the money for a new car. I thought about going to the auctions now that I have more money in hand, or going to test drive cars on my day off but I first hit up the internet to see what was selling. I got around to ebay and there was this super good condition BMW convertible and I’ve missed the T-tops of the Z so convertible equals better. I put a bid in on it not really thinking I would get it. I figure well it would be nice but there isn’t a hope for me to get it it’s going to go higher. Well it did but not that high and I won it. Sweet. It was 4300 for a few days and then at the last min someone tried to snipe me and brought it up to 4965. I imagine that it was a douche bag that just wanted to bid the thing up to cause me to pay more seeing as he stopped just before my highest bid. But whatever it’s still a pretty good price. I’m going to go pick it up and pay for it on thursday so I’ll post pictures then. There are a ton of photos on the ebay page but I want to post ones I take myself.

Tis the season. I had an improv grill on Sunday. I basically called my friend and told him we were going to do some grilling and then got to work. I picked up a chunk of leg of lamb, two racks of ribs, some bread, and corn. I made my own bbq sauce from scratch and put it on one of the racks of ribs, the other one was done in a dry rub by the pope. The lamb I just dumped into the sesame ginger marinate that I always use for it. It ended up getting glazed with my BBQ sauce while on the grill. The bread I cut in half length wise and made some garlic butter that I brushed on the open half. Then when extra herbs and spices, some tomato, provolone cheese with some paprika on top. Paprika works well on cheese it doesn’t burn just sinks into the melting cheese. The bread picked up a really nice meaty smoky flavor, perfectly crunchy on the outside with a warm soft inside. The lamb I cooked medium and while I usually do lamb medium done it turned out amazing. Super juicy I got a good piece this time. The ribs also turned out awesome. It’s too hard to decide which one was better.

I am kicking myself for not taking any pictures because everything rocked so much but at the time I just didn’t feel like walking upstairs to get my cameras. I did take pictures of the beef heart we cooked up last night. I’ll put up a couple pictures of that later today.

The shuttle is supposed to launch today at 2.

Another food post here. This is actaully from last week. I just haven’t gotten around to posting it. It was my turn to cook and I made some brats and apple sauerkraut. I cooked the brats in brandy instead of beer because come on everyone does beer. It’s too common and not actaully as good as brandy. Well starting off with the brandy as a base I add a stick of butter, worshire sauce, balsamic vinegar, a couple dried chillies, ground up mustard seed, black pepper, olive oil, salt, chicken boullion, marjoram, sage, and maybe a couple other herbs I’m forgetting. I let it sit on low heat until it’s all good and mixed and the butter is melted. Then I put on the brats, put white pepper, black pepper, coriander, and honey over top of them. Put on the lid and let cook at between low and medium low heat for 20-30 mins. Flip and recoat with white, black pepper, coriander, and honey. Also stir up the liquid a bit too. Another 20-30 mins or so and the liquid should be just starting to thicken up if you put enough in to begin with. If it’s not thickening or just about to thicken you put too much. Take some out.  Add it to the sauerkraut, just a couple spoon fulls. I leave the lid off the brats at this stage but you have to be careful because that liquid that is keeping them from burning is going away and is going to be less helpful. But you want the skins to toughen up a little and go dark. I sometimes add some more honey around this stage to get the skins to go just a little snappy. They won’t go crispy and you wouldn’t want them to. They’d be burnt. Anyways it only takes another 5 to ten mins to get them perfect and you have to keep an eye on them. They should look similar to the pictures I have. I took that just before they were done.

The apple Sauerkraut is easy. I made way too much. I used two cans of sauerkraut you really only need one. Cut up a couple granny smith apples, a few small red potatos, add some white wine, and herbs. Cook it down while you’re making the brats. Fry up some bacon and cut it up and add it to the pot. Drop some of the liquid from the brats at the end or near the end. As far as the herbs go just stick to peppers, salt, and other stuff that goes well with potatos or sour stuff. You don’t need a lot of herbs the taste from the other stuff will take it far. The potatos will completely cook down and the whole thing becomes a little like mash potatos, it gives it a really hearty taste and it’s super filling. The apples should come across but not like you’re bitting into apple pie or anything. It’s still sauerkraut. The bacon I could have used more on just add it to taste.

Once you’ve got everything done grab a roll slap a brat on it, heap on a ton of the sauerkraut and squirt some mustard on it. Enjoy.

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So having my own kitchen is awesome, possibly even more awesome than the house itself. Only that doesn’t really work because no matter how you slice it the kitchen is always part of the house. But anyways.

I’ve got a couple buddies that like cooking as much or probably more than I do. The most logical thing to do in this case is to have little mini cooking parties. They aren’t really parties but I can think up a suitable word while typing this up. I’ve had about 3 or 4 of these things in the last two weeks but for some reason I never posted anything about them. Well I need a food category so here we go. I’ll post the first one that we did. John or The Pope as he is called made a dish that used octopus, squid, mussels, and a bunch of herbs and veggies. It was amazing. I took pictures and have them up on the pictures section. These pictures or the words I am using to describe it do not do it justice. And this is not something that was made by following a recipe this was just Pope and I throwing things together and bouncing ideas back and forth. I helped but it was pretty much Pope that did the most of the work, this time.

I don’t have a recipe for you because well, I hardly ever use recipes and neither does Pope. I didn’t even catch all the ingredients for it, but in the future if I get a recipe together from something or whatever I’ll post it here as well. All I got for this is buy a bunch of veggies, and mussels and squid and octopus. Cook the veggies down into a broth with a bunch of herbs and spices, then add the octopus with the squid and mussels. Pope had the idea of stuffing the octopus but in the end that doesn’t work all that well because of how much the octopus shrinks. It spat it all out. Cook it until it’s done.

Yeah I know great instructions, whatever.

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