Awesome // Current

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4 months ago

Vintage Lady Gaga

Stefani Germanotta, now known as Lady Gaga, performing at Ultraviolet Live, NYU's annual talent show. She ended up coming in... more

TravG73
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Dennis Kucinich on the Ed Shultz Show Dec 1st

Dennis Kucinich is the man...

asherp
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Dennis Kucinich Debates Bill O'Reily Dec 1st

Dennis Kucinich is the man

asherp
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Kucinich on Democracy Now Dec 2nd, talking about Afghanistan escalation

Kucinich is the man

asherp
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Dennis Kucinich on Anderson Cooper 360 talking about Afghanistan Escalation

Kucinich is the man.

asherp
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Gallery: The Year's Most Amazing Scientific Images

Volcanic Light Show: After lying dormant for more than 9,000 years, the Chaitén volcano belched forth a 40,000-foot-tall... more

ras_menelik
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Gay-bashing woman humiliated for wearing hideous skirt

An angry loser (right) came to Syracuse University to make a fool of herself by spreading pathetic hatred and was treated to a... more

unimatrix0
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Recycled Aluminum Wreaths

An Eco Spin on a Holiday Classic! http://www.eco-artware.com/catalog/BB9-traffic-sign-wreath.php?c=ornaments

DeliaTheArtist
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Dennis Kucinich TOTALLY PWNS Conservative Pundit, Rick Santorum, on Fox News

Congressman Dennis Kucinich debated Fox analyst (Former Senator) Rick Santorum (R-PA) on Afghanistan. Don't miss this... more

asherp
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Scifi-Themed Nativities Offer an Alternative Christmas Story

Were you told the version of the Christmas story with the three wise men or the Fantastic Four? What about the one where a T-Rex... more

pjacobs51
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The Sarah Haskins Song

Click the link to hear the song (and download it for free if you want) DOWNLOAD THIS SONG FOR FREE:... more

asherp
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Video scenes pulled from peoples thoughts

" In a recent experiment, Dr. Gallant claims to have made it possible to reproduce video images from human brain activity. Would you post your thoughts on Youtube?

Although this research has not yet been peer reviewed, Dr. Gallant and his colleague Shinji Nishimoto have used fMRI to scan the brains of two patients as they watched videos. According to the Times Online:

"A computer program was used to search for links between the configuration of shapes, colors and movements in the videos, and patterns of activity in the patients’ visual cortex.

"It was later fed more than 200 days’ worth of YouTube internet clips and asked to predict which areas of the brain the clips would stimulate if people were watching them.

"Finally, the software was used to monitor the two patients’ brains as they watched a new film and to reproduce what they were seeing based on their neural activity alone.

"Remarkably, the computer program was able to display continuous footage of the films they were watching — albeit with blurred images."

For example, in one scene which featured Steve Martin wearing a white shirt, the software recreated his shape and torso but missed other details, like his facial features.

“Some scenes decode better than others,” said Gallant. “We can decode talking heads really well. But a camera panning quickly across a scene confuses the algorithm.

This appears to be the first instance in which video scenes were recovered; previous work has been done to recover spatial memories seen in the hippocampus via fMRI.

This capability has been presaged in science fiction. Fans may recall the movie The Final Cut, starring Robin Williams and Mira Sorvino. In the film, a special implant makes it possible to record the internal images that a person sees and remembers. Robin Williams is a "cutter" who provides edited versions of a person's internal images - a "rememory".

Also, fans of the sci-fi series Farscape may recall the Aurora Chair; employed throughout the Peacekeeper military. It peels back the layers of the mind one by one, until all thoughts and memories are exposed and displayed on a screen attached to the chair (see video)."

http://www.livescience.com/technology/091128-youtube-thoughts.html" In a recent experiment, Dr. Gallant claims to have made it possible to reproduce video images from human brain activity.... more

DeliaTheArtist
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46 comments

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4 months ago

Matt Taibbi Pwns Bailout Apologist

From Morning Meeting Nov. 25, 2009, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi and the Financial Times' Chrystia Freeland discuss... more

asherp
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1 comment

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4 months ago

Projection on Buildings

Impressive and stylish projections on buildings, a renewing way of communicating. http://mag.ma/vimeo/40618

pjacobs51
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1 comment

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4 months ago

This... is... AWESOME!!!!

Only if he has removable clothes... http://tomopop.com/king-leonidas-figure-is-ready-for-a-fight-9888.phtml

Nettle
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6 comments

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4 months ago

Punk Patriot Shirt Review

Hey all! Today I'm reviewing a few shirts designed and created by the wonderful Asher Platts, better known as The Punk... more

Nettle
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14 comments

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4 months ago

14 Extremely Awesome Game and PC Mods

R2D2 gained +infinity cool points with his mod.

TheBrownKid
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1 comment

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4 months ago

Bigger Brains Not Always Smarter

"More brains doesn't necessarily equal more smarts, a new comparison of animal noggins reveals.

Tiny insects could be as intelligent as much bigger animals, despite only having a brain the size of a pinhead, researchers argue in the Nov. 17 issue of the journal Current Biology.

The scientists found that past studies suggest larger animals may need bigger brains simply because there is more to control — for example they need to move bigger muscles and therefore need more and bigger nerves to move them, the authors say. But that may not equate to higher thought.

"In bigger brains we often don't find more complexity, just an endless repetition of the same neural circuits over and over. This might add detail to remembered images or sounds, but not add any degree of complexity," said Lars Chittka, a professor of sensory and behavioral ecology at Queen Mary, University of London. "To use a computer analogy, bigger brains might in many cases be bigger hard drives, not necessarily better processors."

Their argument agrees with some past research, which found that a burst in human intelligence millions of years ago may not be due to brain size alone. (Interestingly, the human brain is shrinking as we continue to evolve, other researchers say.)

Across the animal kingdom, differences in brain size are extreme: A whale's brain can weigh nearly 20 pounds (9 kg), and contain over 200 billion nerve cells, while human brains vary between 2.75 pounds and 3.2 pounds (1.25 kg and 1.45 kg), with an estimated 85 billion nerve cells. A honeybee's brain, on the other hand, weighs only 1 milligram and contains fewer than a million nerve cells.

While some increases in brain size do affect an animal's capability for intelligent behavior, many size differences only exist in a specific brain region. This is often seen in animals with highly developed senses, such as sight or hearing, or an ability to make very precise movements.

The authors suggest that "advanced" thinking requires a very limited number of neurons. Computer modeling shows that even consciousness can be generated with tiny neural circuits, which could in theory easily fit into an insect brain, they write.

In fact, these models suggest that counting could be achieved with only a few hundred nerve cells and only a few thousand could be enough to generate consciousness."

http://www.livescience.com/animals/091124-big-brains-not-better.html"More brains doesn't necessarily equal more smarts, a new comparison of animal noggins reveals. Tiny insects could be... more