PZ Myers wasn't there; he based his whole critique on gizmodo's writeup.

Speaking as someone who was there and heard Kurzweil's full speech, I can confidently say that PZ Myers does not understand Ray Kurzweil.

First off, a significant factual mistake: Kurzweil -clearly- never said we'd reverse engineer the brain by 2020. He argued against exactly that (his prediction was late 2020s, shading into 2030-- perhaps also unbelievable, but if you're going to critique someone, why not get the facts right?). Sure, gizmodo's writeup was entitled "Reverse-Engineering of Human Brain Likely by 2020". It'd be an understandable attribution mistake for say, an undergraduate.

Second, Myers is critiquing Kurzweil's ontological position based on a throwaway writeup dashed off by gizmodo. (Really, Myers? And you wonder why you're a magnet for shitstorms...)

Third, Myers' criticism is essentially that the brain is an emergent system, and we'll have to understand all the protein-protein interactions, functional attributes of proteins, etc. in order to actually model the brain.

This third assumption is arguable, but Kurzweil wasn't actually arguing against this. All Kurzweil meant with his comment about bytes and the genome was there's an interesting information-theoretic view of how much initial data gives rise to the wonderful complexity of the brain.

I had a lot more respect for Myers before I read this rant.

Yes, well, sometimes people who are accused of dealing drugs actually are dealing drugs. Insofar as your comment does not deal with the issue of having to get a legal subpoena in order to procure this information, I feel it clouds the issue.

One has to wonder, if Blizzard goes that far above and beyond requests of law enforcement and gives mountains of data in response to polite requests-- not even subpoenas-- how seriously do they take the privacy of *your* personal information?

I'm glad the bad guy got caught, etc, but handing over the keys to the kingdom to law enforcement without a subpoena implies, in my mind, that respect for users' privacy is simply not something Blizzard considers when they go about their business. Or rather, that such information is their property, not yours.

Given the assumption that cryogenic revival will be possible, this may work in principle-- but the insurance industry doesn't exactly function on immutable code-like rules that can be hacked for fun and profit.

It's much more a game-- and moreover, the game is owned by the insurance industry. You're just playing it. And if you figure out a particularly good trick to beat the house, they're either going to rationalize why certain technicalities mean they don't need to pay you (and thus 'easy money' becomes 'try to drag deep-pocketed defendants into court'), or they'll simply change the rules before you're revived, and you won't have been able to do anything about it because you were dead.

From a what-do-you-have-to-lose perspective, sure, it's worth a shot. But this simply can't be a dependable part of estate planning.

If Modern humans and Neanderthals were so different, how likely is it that fertile offspring could have been born?

We don't currently know enough to say much about the fertility of human-neanderthal hybrids, but see, for example, Ligers for fertile cross-species hybrids (and lions and tigers are separated by about twice as much time-since-divergence as humans and neanderthals, off the top of my head).

If it is not likely, could horizontal gene transfer have been a factor?

In short, no. Very probably not a significant factor. HGT happens quite often between, say, bacteria; bacteria and viruses occasionally leave nonfunctional copies of themselves in host genomes (which can provide entropic fuel for evolution); very seldomly, some other sorts of microorganism-host HGT can happen (e.g., how plants developed chloroplasts). But, from theory and genomic evidence, we can say pretty confidently that HGT just doesn't happen directly between say, two mammals.

Simply put, there just isn't a viable vector (bacteria, virus, loose DNA, etc) that could move a gene from one organism into the germline of another. Something like cannibalism could -very arguably- allow some gene transfer, but it wouldn't get passed down in the germline.

The issue of introgression (gene flow from neanderthals to modern humans) is hugely important. It's a lot more important than the curiosity or oddity the Times article makes it out to be.

All the published studies looking for this introgression have been based on neanderthal mDNA. Since it doesn't undergo recombination, it's not a good marker, and the negative results so far are predictable and do not preclude gene flow. It'll be interesting to see Paabo's results. He's been working on getting nDNA data from neanderthal remains for a while now, and perhaps this is a hint that he's found some introgression.

Why it's important:

The small picture of why it's important is it would substantially redefine our family tree. We could refine our primate phylogeny.

The bigger, more hazy, and potentially earthshaking picture of why this could be important is that it doesn't take many viable pairings to get genes from one gene pool to another, and these genes could have been very important to our development. Modern humans and neanderthals were under many of the same environmental stresses but likely developed different adaptions to them. This includes behavior and cognition genes. As Stringer points out in the article, "in the last 10,000-15,000 years before they died out, around 30,000 years ago, Neanderthals were giving their dead complex burials and making tools and jewellery, such as pierced beads, like modern humans.” Proto-modern humans were smart. But neanderthals were also smart, potentially in different and complimentary ways. And perhaps it took a combination of proto-modern human and neanderthal genes to truly make the modern human mind. Our brains could be an example of 'hybrid vigor' on a grand scale.

So the big question mark is whether, given we can determine gene flow, if this hypothetical combination of proto-modern human and neanderthal cognitive adaptions could have led to the cultural explosion of ~30-50 thousand years ago. The biology is plausible and the timing's right. The data's still out, but it's coming in. Odder hypotheses have come true.

Here are some questions I have about the chip:

- These chips/systems already exist. What's new about this MIT effort? The Computerworld article was very sparse.

- There's a great deal of bidirectional communication that goes on in normal eyes-- information not only flowing from eye to brain, but from brain to eye as well. As far as I know these tech just discards these signals. Is this important?

- Last I heard, this sort of technology was approaching 1000 effective pixels of visual information (assuming ideal electrode placement). Has this effort from MIT pushed this boundary? How does '1000 effective pixels' compare to the eye's effective resolution? Can we put normal vision in terms of pixel resolution?

- I've read about shunting tactile senses (for instance, the nerves on a person's tongue) over to a digital videocamera. I believe the military has done a fair bit of research into this. Could this sort of approach be viable for helping the blind function as well? Could it become the preferred approach since it seems less invasive than ocular- and neuro-surgery?

Ah, well that's potentially useful. Thanks for the info.

Despite the name, Sidewiki is not a wiki such that people can edit, prune, and synthesize information, nor is it moderated in any way. It's just a comment system, with no way to amplify the signal vs the noise. It's also unclear how people are supposed to use it- e.g., what to post (which is a significant failing imo). Interesting as an approach to layer user comments onto webpages, but not useful yet. Arstechnica pretty much nailed it with the following:

This new offering from Google is intriguing in some ways and it shows that the company is thinking creatively about how to build dialog and additional value around existing content. The scope and utility of the service seems a bit narrow. The random nature of the existing annotations suggest that the quality and depth of the user-contributed content will be roughly equivalent with the comments that people post about pages at aggregation sites like Digg and Reddit.
What makes Wikipedia content useful is the ability of editors to delete the crap and restructure the existing material to provide something of value. Without the ability to do that with Sidewiki, it's really little more than a glorified comment system and probably should have been built as such. As it stands, I think that most users will just be confused about what kind annotations they should post.

When I play wow, I probably play too much. I'd like to use some built-in functionality to gently put limits on my playtime and remind me how much I've played in a week. At first I had high hopes that the Parental Controls function could help me.

Unfortunately, though the rest of wow's interface is great, its parental controls are not only a crime against all that is beautiful and elegant, but pretty useless in the real world. There's no way to set "able to play X hours per week" or "able to play Y hours per weekday, Z hours per weekend". One must set a hard-coded block schedule, click okay, then hope you've predicted your exact needs. And there's no in-game warning when you're coming up against a limit-- you're simply disconnected when it hits.

Please, please, please tell me there are plans afoot to fix this tool and perhaps remake it into a more general method for account owners to manage playtime better? Extra kudos if it could include a Netflix-style option to put your account on vacation for a variable length of time...

It's pretty clear that the real reason for this delay isn't some minor quibble regarding content. It's that China doesn't want a Western/foreign company to dominate their online gaming market.

Clever, unethical (from certain standpoints), and frustrating for Blizzard, no doubt.

If there were any high-quality for-pay alternatives, I'd say he might have a point.

Unfortunately, most antivirus software sucks, with Symantec more or less epitomizing how good ideas on paper can turn into terrible/buggy/bloated security software that actually increases your exposure since it adds another node malicious code can attack. Symantec's argument-from-assertion notwithstanding, there doesn't seem to be any correlation between antivirus software being for-pay and higher quality.

From my experience, there's really bad antivirus software (such as Norton, which I have zero confidence in and would never let touch my machine), and slightly less bad antivirus software. What went wrong? Why does this industry suck so badly? Anyone have any insight?

It's certainly an interesting development, and one that I think will slightly curb the growth of gold farming, gold spam, wacky in-game currency trends, and so forth, but I think the real question here is, why would this be in China's interest to do this, and shut down a blossoming home-grown (if gray-market) industry?

The IW article notes that "The government justifies its ban on virtual currency trading as a way to curtail gambling and other illegal online activities." It just seems this isn't the real or whole story, though. Control? International reputation? Deals with Chinese MMO devs?