Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:fMRI? (Score 1) 52

"The procedure is similar to MRI but uses the change in magnetization between oxygen-rich and oxygen-poor blood as its basic measure."- so now think about it. Yes it could find false positives in dead fish brain, but it is still a good way to acquire information about the brain activity of a living being. Yes I also do know that a damaged brain area also shows abnormally high oxidation but you can just pick the healthy volunteers for this kind of study. It sometimes seems that some people just don't want to understand things.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Comment Fuels? Rockets? The cool green explosion stuff? (Score 1) 39

Any chemists out there? Will it make a nice fuel when the hydrogen is attached? Like this one:
http://aviationtrivia.blogspot...
Would it be dangerous like this dude here says (read the tendencies part):
http://www.dequasiebooks.com/g...
I also read that these fuels were also researched in USSR. It always makes me wonder what didn't happen there. I know a couple of nice stories myself about the things that didn't happen. Things only happened when they were good or meant to be terrifying or when their fallout set off the alarms in Swedish nuclear plant. I did read these bits about boron based fuels when there was some article about green UFO-s. I know these sources might not be adecuate or true, so you might want to add your own.

Comment OpenEEG? (Score 1) 41

So how does it differ from OpenEEG project? I read the summary and I read a couple of paragraphs from their site, but it was all some round talk. You can get fully assembled 2 channel (uses smt components - it's small) OpenEEG device from Olimex for 99 euros (+electrodes and shipping costs), if you are not into soldering.

Comment Re:Stronger than steel (Score 1) 82

Yeah, this shit is basically worthless if it rots when it gets wet.

Is that why people have never used wood as a construction material?

What are you implying? Is it something that explains why people have never considered stone, concrete, steel, aluminium alloys or carbon fiber to be better construction materials than wood?

Comment TDCs (Score 3, Informative) 138

It is called tDCS and it has already formed an amateur community, search in Reddit for example, many have bought their devices and many of them have made them themselves. If you are going to try this, then do your research and try to be safe. There are safety guidelines made by some guy here for example:
http://speakwisdom.wordpress.c...
Also there was a study on rats which found that :"Brain lesions occurred at a current density of 142.9 A/m2 for durations greater than 10 minutes."
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19403329
Exceeding recommended current will probably give you skin burns long before you reach anything brain damaging. Don't get me wrong though, I don't recommend you anything and I am not a doctor either.

Comment Re:no Ghost_no "singularity"_only sci-fi (Score 2) 426

Maybe if you read the article that the Slashdot summary refers to, you would also read a little about the criticism about the claim that human consciousness is not computable. The criticism pretty much destroys this and it appears that the "definite proof of non-computability" translates to "err..me thinks its not possible for humans to make it" (to mimic the function of a human brain). Maybe I should point some out:

*The neural network of human brain can be atomized down to neurons and their connections. It is not magic. Do you believe in magic?

*“Memory functions must be vastly non-lossy, otherwise retrieving them repeatedly would cause them to gradually decay,” What BS is that? Retrieving a memory strengthens it, and encoding a memory in brain is lossy or non-lossy only based on what you consider the information being stored - if we consider everything that the human sense neurons fire then of course most of it gets lost and also the chemical composition of a neuron changes over time which affects the info it contains. You could achieve a non-lossy encoding of couple of numbers through a lots of redundancy.

*"You can't remove the smell of a chocolate from a brain" - why not? You just don't know which neurons exactly contain the information and how to target them exactly but you could erase the memory from your brain by using a shot-gun.

*The cs guy only says that according to his research the human consciousness either does not fully fall under the definition or being perfectly integrated or it does not compute. So the bad journalism automatically picked the second.

* Why does the word science appeal so much to the biggest morons on Slashdot? Ironic, isn't it?

Slashdot Top Deals

The Tao is like a glob pattern: used but never used up. It is like the extern void: filled with infinite possibilities.

Working...