Yeah, a bunch of us here on Slashdot moved much of the conversation to Twitter. Unfortunately, Trump seems to get a bunch of the bandwidth there too.

Totally understood. The trick is: you can tune your own signal/noise. Its very handy and I get essentially all my news via Twitter these days.

Its all on Twitter man...

I bought two cases of LEDs for $2.99 each at Costco (one 60W equiv, one 75W) . Yep, $2.99. I replaced every bulb, inside and outside my house and it's really nice. The color is the same all over the house, and knowing I won't have to change one till I'm well past 60 is VERY Cool.

Whut up, yo? Mostly moved to Twitter... You have an account... why don't I see you there much?

Sometimes there are services that don't have another option for online payment *other* than PayPal. It kind of sucks, but there it is. Just make sure you never keep any money in the account. PayPal's been pulling this kind of shit for years. I'm surprised no one has taken them to court over it yet (or if they had, why it hasn't made the news).

The 1200 was second gen Amiga. My first was a 1000 (with the optional 256k RAM module in front) and I preferred it to my Mac. I remember spending $600 for a RAM module the size of a hardback book that hooked to a huge port on the side and gave me (gasp) 1MB of RAM. That was enough to run the whole OS in RAM. This was my bbs machine, and my CI$ and Genie box. I used a C128 to run Quantum Link.

I got a 3000 in 1990 but soon went Mac and Linux for good.

As always, I will be distributing beer and fried chicken embryos.

That is how we celebrate Halloween in France.

Check into it and ask about the impact of retinal remodeling on potential interventions.

Nossir. That is not correct. See my comment just above.

Yes. Precisely.

[sigh].... do not feed the troll.... do not feed the troll...

OK, I'll feed the troll. Yes, I am acutely aware of Paul Bach-y-Rita's work. You however apparently do not understand the concepts that you are invoking. There is plasticity in neural systems, yes. Plasticity is important in vision, sure. Nobody, *anywhere* has demonstrated that they can generate coherent "visual percepts" in a coordinated fashion with any kind of stimulus. Its far more complicated than hooking up electrodes and stimulating until someone "learns" what the stimulus means.

btw, the tongue thing is very, very cool. Its not vision and does not even map to vision, but those lingual electrodes can easily map topographic data, sonar data, relief data, contrast data onto the high resolution innervation of the tongue and allow people to interpret those stimulii as a map to be followed. The technology was originally developed for US Navy SEALS to navigate complex 3D environments at night, with no light and it works. It works incredibly well with very little training necessary. I would like to see more effort and funds put into techniques like that to help people live more independent lives.

I am familiar with Nirenberg's work. What Nirenberg seems to be missing is that the programming outflow of the retina is altered in retinal disease. ON and OFF channels are substantially altered in retinal disease and the whole programming substrate is altered because the circuitry and programming down to the molecular levels is altered.

Its not all pessimism though as we will need to understand how the normal retina signals and I find her work to be interesting and compelling. Though she is not addressing *which channels* of information outflow are being encoded. There are 14-16 separate outflow channels in the retina that project to different areas of cortex and sub cortex and she is not addressing how to separate those channels and what those separate channels mean in terms of the "visual world".

This is just my point. While I understand that science and engineering has to start somewhere, they have made promises to this woman and done surgery to her, potentially increasing risks for other problems where I would argue there is no hope of "seeing" anything coherent.

Yes, we can do remarkable things with even an 8x8 pixel array, but this approach has no promise of even delivering that to this woman. The electrode cuff on the optic nerve simply stimulates too many neurons that are not coherent and those neurons project to far too many areas of cortex. A retinal implant that appropriately targets cell populations would be more appropriate as would genetic engineering of targeted opsins to other cell classes.

As for implants directly in the cortex, I might argue that this has a better chance of stimulating phosphenes that could be interpreted as vision. I've participated in some of that early work http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2009/08/bionic-implants/ and while I believe there are other approaches that will be more effective, that work still has some promise (particularly for motor interfaces).

Ah, ad hominem attacks from an Anonymous Coward... You will note that I am an "eye doctor". What are your qualifications to call someone else a clown?