My recollection is that the best designs currently have a few thousand electrodes, and that resolution roughly corresponds to the big E on the eye chart. As you say, it's brute force. For each spatial location, the retina is covered by at least 20 types of ganglion cells (which are getting zapped), each of which send a different signal to the central brain. Each electrode might zap a few cells sensitive to motion in different directions, a few with different color opponency, contrast sensitivity, etc. Beats the hell out of blindness though.

Well you won't find me on a sportbike, but I suggest that deaths per passenger mile is a relevant statistic here. From the Air_safety Wikipedia page, it's 3e10 for air and 1.7e8 for driving. Assuming a trip of 1000 miles gives a driving fatality rate of 1.7e5 per passenger trip. My family of 4 is going ~3000 miles round trip, so that's 1.4e4 fatalities per crazy nerd family trip. Put another way, for every other 14000 families that make the same decision as mine did, one person will die. And that's not even counting injuries, which are more likely in a car than deaths. Crap. I should have done this calculation after the trip.

Flying is statistically safer than driving. People like me are choosing to drive long distances because they do not want their children subjected to enhanced pat-downs (or is it pats-down?). Statistically, more people driving longer distances should cause more injuries and death due to traffic accidents. Any slashdotters have an estimate of the expected increase in fatalities, or perhaps an effect that might counter this increase? Either way, I wish they'd just respect the 4th amendment.

1960 preceded the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In much of the south, blacks were considered the equivalent of beasts. The Catholic Church still abducted native Americans from their families and put them in Catholic schools, reasoning that their tribal culture did not meet the standards of rational thought. For a more academic viewpoint, check out the 1971 book The Pre-Columbian Mind, where a MD/historian Francisco Guerra weighs historical evidence to promote the viewpoint that people living in indigenous societies were indeed capable of rational thought. Or, maybe have a look into the Eugenics movement. http://www.amazon.com/War-Against-Weak-Eugenics-Americas/dp/0914153056/ref=sr_1_1 It's unwise to assume that the vast majority holds your intelligent, enlightened opinions.

Unfortunately yes. It's only been about half a century since there was active social debate in the US about whether people from other races were just dumb, mindless beasts.

A quick Google search for google blog yields the official google blog, which doesn't even allow comments. I've seen Google-based blogs here and there with comment sections, but have never found them very useful or interesting. Maybe /. comment moderation isn't perfect, especially for politically charged or anti-Google posts, but it's as good or better than any other blog I read. I wonder what Steve Yegge would say about this...

Looks like I misunderstood the question - you're probably staying in the same lab, in which case the department name on your degree will not matter at all. Only your skill set.

Bio-informatics is a good place to be an applied statistician. There are also good opportunities in neuroscience, especially if you want (or are willing to) do experiments. Some of the data analysis and acquisition code is pretty sophisticated, and a grad student from my last lab got a good CS job by doing that. Further, any lab that uses super-resolution or EM microscopy is a good place to look. If you tell me which school, I can perhaps give you a few names.

From TFA: "The gaming system will focus on certain types of bias that frequently hurt effective decision-making: Confirmation bias -- the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms preconceptions. Blind spot bias -- being less aware of one's own cognitive biases than those of others. Fundamental attribution error -- over-emphasizing personality-based or character-based effects on behavior. Anchoring bias -- relying too heavily on one trait or one piece of information. Representative bias -- judging the likelihood of a hypothesis by its resemblance to immediately available data. Projection bias -- assuming others share one's current feelings, values or thinking" Sounds pretty general to me.

These games are designed for a general audience to mitigate generic types of cognitive biases. Simulators are designed to improve performance on specific tasks, but I am not aware that they improve performance on everyday tasks. I'm not saying that tinkering with simulators isn't fun, but it doesn't exactly have the same mass appeal as something like Grand Theft Auto. Thus given the requirements (general audience, improve generalized decision-making), my guess is that the bells and whistles that commercial developers use for entertainment value, such as sex scenes, will be largely absent, and this may reduce the appeal and hence the effect on improvement. Will the effects be restricted to motivated players with a good attitude who go out and look for fun? If lemons must be made into lemonade for positive results, serious games may not help much in general. And correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm under the impression that most seamen prefer getting mashed in rifle drill (or really anything) to those lectures ;-)

Will educational games (more serious and presumably less fun than an ordinary first person shooting rampage through a novel virtual environment) improve your ability to make decisions or track objects, analogous to the improvements documented for recreational FPS games? The US government wants to know because it's recently become clear that playing video games does improve performance. Nature Reviews Neuroscience has a nice review on the issue this week, "Brains on video games" http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v12/n12/abs/nrn3135.html

has geek/pol cred.

Tyler Durden was also my first thought. Most of the Tylers are thoroughly anonymous, so alleged contributor Daniel Ivandjiiski would be a good place to start looking IRL.

I think you're correct. Near Prague and Sparks there's mostly shallow production with vertical wells, not any of the horizontal wells that use the massive staged fracs.

Not that I've ever seen. When I was in school, it was common knowledge that you wouldn't be held back, no matter how little you did, because it really wouldn't do any good for the school. Especially if you were a troublemaker, they didn't want to see you again. In addition, the students in a class would often band together and refuse to do any work, especially for a weak or lazy teacher, because they knew the teacher could/would not fail the majority of the class. Depending on the school, there is some combination of learning and babysitting. Mine was largely babysitting, and I wouldn't be surprised if the people who couldn't read in high school now work for large corporations and send lousy emails.