Entries from October 2007 ↓

The 34th edition of Encephalon, a quick guide to the previous two weeks worth of neuroscience news, has been posted at Distributed Neuron.

From Encephalon 34:

To start, Jake Young gives us a great analysis of a study of human and macaque visual cortices. Researchers dissected and analyzed the brains of people who had lost vision in one eye, comparing the results to a controlled study of macaques who had been partially blinded. It’s a fascinating analysis that also demonstrates the limits of fMRI.

FreeRice.com donates money for food to the United Nations World Food Program. They’ve instituted an interesting program to collect the money for donation. They’ve setup a leveled vocabulary database and present a word and 4 possible single world definitions. For each correct answer they donate 10 grains of rice to the WFP. You can play as long as you’d like. Advertisers display either a logo or an ad at the bottom of the screen and in doing so are paying for the donations. According to the website, as of yesterday 137,769,030 grains of rice have been donated.

Certainly an interesting idea and hopefully one that catches on.

Here is a video of an introduction speech for the class Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs given by Hal Abelson of MIT in 1986:

I started this blog with no specific intent and due to some early success with Digg and StumbleUpon users have had the luxury of having a few relatively popular blog articles early on. I’d like to return the favor of all of the comments and response that I’ve had by creating a little contest. We are quickly approaching our 100th comment on this site and I’d like to offer a little something back to the community for the person who breaks the 200 comment mark.

As I mentioned in the “Distributed Lending” post, I am a member of Kiva. I will personally donate money to any individual or business on Kiva’s website on behalf of the person who posts the 200th comment. To be eligible, please post a legitimate email address with any comments you’ve made.

Contact me here if you have any questions.

Alan Watts was an author, philosopher, and one of the foremost experts on comparative religion. This is a video created for a speech he did. I don’t know that the visuals or the background music really add anything, but its a pretty awesome speech.