Tiny infobits, huge shockwaves

June 2007

Back to Milan

Posted 25 June 2007 - 8:21pm

Back from the Synthetic Biology (SB) conference in Zurich.

I did not understand most of the details because I lack a biology background, but I came away with a few ideas:
- they are trying to define the boundaries of the field, but they lack the technical tools to lower the barriers of entry (million dollars today); so right now nothing similar to the WWW is going to develop

On intelligence

Posted 22 June 2007 - 3:33pm

Just finished reading On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. The impression I have is that we are starting to understand something about how the brain works, but we are a long way to completely understanding it.

Synthetic Biology 3.0

Posted 22 June 2007 - 10:44am

Tomorrow I'll be in Zurich attending the Synthetic Biology 3.0 conference.

I have not finished reading the Cell Biology book, so I might not understand much, but gotta start somewhere, and I thought a few days in Zurich would not be so bad after all, since in Milan it is very hot now.

Meeting in Rome

Posted 17 June 2007 - 1:37pm

The First Generation Meeting in Rome was a success. People were really enthusiastic about everything, and we were tired :-) We succeeded in gathering a very interesting mix of people, mostly Entrepreneurs.

Modifying neuron firing patterns

Posted 9 June 2007 - 3:44pm

Scientists added a new firing pattern to a bundle of neurons. The new firing pattern lasted 2 days and did not "disturb" the preexisting pattern.

Forgetting is a sign of intelligence

Posted 5 June 2007 - 11:31am

It makes sense that the brain works this way. We forget less important things, so that we keep only the most important ones.

Thus intelligence is also forgetting unimportant stuff.