This article, by Paul Graham, perfectly describes our state of mind when building Splinder into the largest blogging platform in Italy.

We focused on users, that was our compass, and we focused on usage growth, not on generating revenues, because that would have killed the project. We kept costs down and survived all the business and life odds.

While thinking about the emergence of "new rules" from simple rules and the inadequacy of mathematics to model across levels, I never thought about the implication of this line of reasoning beyond science and technology into the realm of philosophy and religion.

I am attending the Cognitive Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop which is organized by the University of Zürich and is being held in Capo Caccia, Sardinia.

The place is fantastic, and the talks are excellent.

One of the first things I noticed, when I started reading about Bio-Inspired AI and neuroscience, is the notion that we cannot say that we "really" understand something unless we find a suitable "traditional" mathematical model that approximates it in a way or another.

How is development of communication technologies going to affect house prices?

When "real" virtual reality is available, and when it is almost indistinguishable from physical reality (except for touch and smell), it will make it irrelevant to live in cities like New York or San Francisco. Those cities will not command a price premium in housing any more and house prices will go down, that's one view ...

Instead, the author of this article on the New York Times thinks that the price premium will actually increase, because people still want to stick together, and more so now than before.

This is the kind of post I was going to write, if I had time and the writing skills of this guy. In fact I had already started writing it, using a top-down approach, whereas the post I am linking uses a bottom up approach.

A year ago I met Richard Boly in Rome, through a common friend. Richard was working on Capturing Creativity, a program launched by the US Ambassador in Rome, Ronald Spogli.

While reading about Neuroscience, Biology, Bio-inspired Artificial Intelligence and Evolutionary Robotics, I was struck by the fact that it seems like in each of these fields, mathematics is stretched to the point that it is no longer useful to model system complexity. It instead gets in the way of simple and elegant explanations about emergence and models that might be able to link different levels of complexity within a system.

I finally got an answer, which of course is derived from a model (inspired by Engineering).

But at least here is an answer, which I could not get before, and I got it reading the Neural Engineering book.

Here is a little illusion game that you can play online. It illustrates how vision works.

I am reading a book called "Neural Engineering". It is a framework or theory of how the brain can be modeled in terms of Engineering, with theories derived mostly from Electrical Engineering.