..This looks to be a pretty complicated beast that's built onto a table top and looks very much like a graduate research lab.. I wonder what the up time is?.. Mounts can drift with temperature, the bench does not look sealed, there is the potential for dust and contamination.. The laser power can fluctuate every so slightly and are probably run in optical-power mode.. The lasers can't be constantly up, etc. ..I used to work at a laser company that converted a bench-top tunable femtosecond laser with a lot of knobs that took a graduate student to run, and made it into an OEM product that was controller by a computer. It's hard to make commercial products out of some systems because it's hard to make it reliable (like femtosecond amplifiers).. I'm sure this thing requires a lot of babysitting. I wonder how long the measurement can stay stable?

The answer is yes, it does. The graph you showed us shows a linear trend line to fit the data.. This may have been entirely different in the time of the dinosaurs where the brains were apparently much smaller.

Does body mass tend to scale linearly with brain mass?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

The rat has an estimated 200E6 Neurons and 4.48E11 synapses, and the mouse has 71E6 neurons and ~1E11 synapses.

There is at least some correlation between intelligence and the number of neurons. A cursory search found this: -- Fact or Fiction: When It Comes to Intelligence, Does Brain Size Matte? http://www.scientificamerican....

It would be interesting to find more definitive articles that support or contrast this.

I have a friend that worked at the Stanford medical center's pediatric intensive care unit, where his patients were often flown in/helicoptered from all over the state. There are certain diseases that have a 100% mortality rate in children, where they could be fine two weeks before, and near death when he gets them. He developed a cure that saves about half the kids, and attributes most of the lost ones for not getting then to him fast enough. Everywhere else in the world they die. Stanford, being a research hospital, allowed him to experiment. He had a dilemma that bothered him immensely-- In order to gain wider acceptance, the medical community wanted to have a double blind test to see if the test, and show statistics.. When I last spoke with him, he was thinking about the minimum set of kids that would have to die and still be statistically acceptable. This was about 8 years ago, and don't know the current status. I'm not a doctor, and may have some of the details wrong. He did mention that his point of view was controversial, and it's hard for other doctors to reconcile that his patients lived though was was normally consider a death sentence.. He mentioned that he had to manage multiple organ failure trying to restore them to health. If a child was flown in fast enough, there was a good chance of a 100% recovery.

He had an interesting theory about the body and death (if I recall correctly) -- He believes that under some conditions, the autoimmune response goes out of control and starts actively trying to kill you. A lot of disease vectors and allergies can trigger this. . He said your body actively produces a lot of nasty toxins that cause multiple organ failures.. He did research on dialysis filters, and made sure to continuously purge the blood stream for the toxins. He would also follow up with chemotherapy to aid in autoimmune response suppression.. His method called for a very high volume of IV fluid which was pretty expensive. Stanford was willing to fit the bill. He believes that this method could be used to treat older patients as well.

Through a fog of memory, I'd like find out how this guy is doing. He's still doing pediatric critical care work, but moved on to Samaritan Hospital. He tells me that a lot of doctors he knows can't handle children dying in intensive care wards. He's an optimist and thinks about the number of children he's saved.. There are unsung heroes all around us.

..Like Okular on Linux, etc. I'm not fond of any program contacting the mother-ship without my permission..

When I was in college, I remember being nervous about checking out books in the library. The librarian assured me that your lending habits are not part of the public record. At the time, I was working in a physical chemistry research lab, and the books in question were locked up in the cage out of a concern for explosives and public safety.

This incident sounds like a good case for recording all of your conversations with such companies. It is my understanding that you have to tell them that the conversation is being recorded; something they may not agree to. Does anyone here know more about the terms and conditions of this CYA method?

This example seems pretty hard to believe / outlandish but unreasonable and vindictive if true. It would be interesting to hear if there were similar stories from other people.

Crystal light? .. Reminds me of of the poem by Eugene Field. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night Sailed off in a wooden shoe — Sailed on a river of crystal light, Into a sea of dew. "Where are you going, and what do you wish?" The old moon asked the three. "We have come to fish for the herring fish That live in this beautiful sea; Nets of silver and gold have we!" Said Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song, As they rocked in the wooden shoe, And the wind that sped them all night long Ruffled the waves of dew. The little stars were the herring fish That lived in that beautiful sea — "Now cast your nets wherever you wish — Never afeard are we"; So cried the stars to the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

All night long their nets they threw To the stars in the twinkling foam — Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe, Bringing the fishermen home; 'Twas all so pretty a sail it seemed As if it could not be, And some folks thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed Of sailing that beautiful sea — But I shall name you the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes, And Nod is a little head, And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies Is a wee one's trundle-bed. So shut your eyes while mother sings Of wonderful sights that be, And you shall see the beautiful things As you rock in the misty sea, Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.

Here is the Silly Symphony version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

This sound like something out of one of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels..

I understand that these are major polluters.. I've seen pictures in a Britannica "Science and the future" book of bulk transport ships using large servo driven metal sails. I wonder to what extent this technology has been explored. When doing a google search, I found this http://www.cnet.com/news/cargo... ..But it doesn't look like it was actually built.

I've heard anecdotal evidence that a transport ship is equivalent to 50,000 cars.. And this site http://www.viewzone.com/sixtee... claims that it's much higher. I'd be interested in in a reliable source for this. I understand that they use different fuel depending on how close they are to a human settlement, and the cheap stuff is a really big polluter. It's a solid a room temperature and has to be heated up to flow into the engine. At the very least, I'd like to see electrostatic percipitators on the smoke-stacks.

We once had world trade based on sail. Much/ most of that cargo does not need to get to it's destination quickly..

I do a lot of FPGA programming and It takes me 15-20 minutes to synthesize a design on a modern fast computer. As more of the part is being used, synthesis takes more and more time, as the chip becomes harder to rout.. I'm a user that is primarily CPU bound. I hope that Intel will continue to push on the raw performance. For the past few years, as we've only seen marginal improvements in CPU performance.

There is also the issue that FPGAs keep getting cheaper/bigger, so no matter how fast your rig, it always takes a long time to synthesize. I'd be curious about what other FPGA developers use to boot performance.. Overclocking/water cooling does seem to help, as does using faster ram.

I've had bad experiences myself, though it's a field I have little interest personally. There seems to be a market opportunity.

Just because cancer has been around for a very long time, should not make us defeatists.. I spent 5 years working on DNA sequencers and cancer cell sorting robots, and still consider biology to be hundreds of years behind other branches of science because we have not, until very recently had the tools to study the differences between cancer and normal cells at the DNA level. The Illumina machine can images two flow cells at once -- one for cancer, and one for normal cells. We can now study what happened to make the DNA replication fail and mutate, etc. Apparently it's now possible to do this for $1000.. The human genome project originally cost about 2 billion dollars.. The reduction in infrastructure and cost has been extraordinary.

We can now better identify specific cancers to take out some of the guesswork. In the journal Nature a few years ago , doctors used a DNA sequencer to identify a misdiagnosed cancer (muscle cancer in his lung, producing large tumors) who had only weeks to live, and brought him back from the brink with the right treatment. We've spend the last 40 years developing specific cures, and it was only just guess work to decide what actual cancer a patient had.. This was circa 2007-8..

One thing that really encouraged me a few years ago was a documentary from PBS called Cancer Warrior, that outlined the work of Judah Folkman and is work on angiogenic inhibitors.. Apparently tumors can trigger a persons body to grow veins to connect it to a blood supply , and that you can pick up unique chemical signatures of individual tumors in a patients urine..Strangely enough, large tumors send out chemicals that inhibit the growth of other tumors, and is why we often see many more tumors after removing one large tumor. We now have drugs that form angiogenic inhibitors ... Perhaps in the future we will understand how to create custom tumor growth inhibitor agents that have been tailored for a specific patient by analyzing the signatures in their urine.... An interesting application of synthesis and analytical chemistry.. I wonder what is the current state of research..

Probably you mean NA -- for narcotics anonymous. I think AA generally means "Alcoholics Anonymous". It wouldn't make sense that AA is keeping them sober while alcohol is their go-to drug.

I have a good friend of mine that I'd like to see continue his NA meetings. He's one of the sharpest programmers I've ever worked with, but somehow got into drugs that were somehow in his scene that had nothing to do with work (partying in SF). He's now unemployed as it's hard to keep down a job with the erratic behavior that drugs give you. I wish I could do more for him, and understand that an addict has to want to change, and that there is not much his friends can do for him. I'd be interested in advice for how coax an addict out of their addiction.