Diary of a Wolfeman

Ok, so it’s really rat-based, but it makes for a good headline if you’re familiar with the song.

A story at UF News tells how some folks at University of Florida dumped a clump of rat grey matter into a petri dish loaded with electrical connectors, and wouldn’t you know it, the whole blob grew itself into a neural network, establishing neural connections through trial-and-error, all on it’s own.

When DeMarse first puts the neurons in the dish, they look like little more than grains of sand sprinkled in water. However, individual neurons soon begin to extend microscopic lines toward each other, making connections that represent neural processes. “You see one extend a process, pull it back, extend it out – and it may do that a couple of times, just sampling who’s next to it, until over time the connectivity starts to establish itself,” he said. “(The brain is) getting its network to the point where it’s a live computation device.”

To see what this new mess of brain cells could do, they hooked it up to a desktop PC and ran a flight sim. Lo and behold, the fucking thing learned to fly a jet. In rough weather.

Now, they don’t go into tons of juicy details here, but the evil genius in me is going overtime on the possibilities.

BtFR, or B the Former Roomate has finally succumbed to peer pressure and got himself a blog. Being a photographer, he chose the name Aperture Settlings. Stop by and check it out!

Wouldn’t you know it, in the time since that last post, I’ve gotten about a hundred comment spams. Bastards.

…and he’s worried about your TV habits.

CNN.com – Flat-screen TV emits international distress signal – Oct 18, 2004

An Oregon man discovered earlier this month that his year-old Toshiba Corporation flat-screen TV was emitting an international distress signal picked up by a satellite, leading a search and rescue operation to his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon, 70 miles south of Portland.

The signal from Chris van Rossmann’s TV was routed by satellite to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Base in Virginia.

I guess it didn’t like his porn collection :)

Yahoo! News reports on this almost slam-dunk for computer users across America. The House of Representatives voted 399 to 1 to impose fines on the bastards who write and distribute spyware.

Wouldn’t you know it was a Texan Republican who voted against it.

The most egregious behaviors ascribed to the category of such software – secretly recording a person’s computer keystrokes or mouse clicks – are already illegal under U.S. wiretap and consumer protection laws.

The House proposal, known as the “Spy Act,” adds civil penalties over what has emerged as an extraordinary frustration for Internet users, whose infected computers often turn sluggish and perform unexpectedly.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Mary Bono (news, bio, voting record), R-Calif., provides guidelines for technology companies that distribute software capable of most types of electronic monitoring. It requires that consumers explicitly choose to install such software and agree to the information being collected.

Not surprisingly, an investigation revealed over 60 different varieties of spyware installed on the panel’s own computers. This bill adds civil fines to the toolbox authorities have for fighting cybercrime.

Law enforcement agancies operating under a wiretap order are, of course, exempt.

CNN.com reports that Scaled Composites’ SpaceShipOne successfully completed it’s second trip to space within two weeks and has claimed the Ansari Z Prize for 10 million dollars, ushering in a new age in privately-funded space flight.

SpaceShipOne gets a ride to the upper atmosphere strapped to the belly of it’s mothership the WhiteKnight, then releases and fires it’s own rocket to soar into space. At the end of the flight, she glides back to Earth and lands on a conventional runway.

The current craft is only capable of three passengers, but Scaled Composites will now have not only the X Prize monies, but also a deal with the Virgin Group to launch Virgin Galactic worth another $25 million to expand the project and launch commercial space tourism over the next few years.

Anyone who has watched NASA’s budget go up and down over the years will be pleased to know that space exploration is no longer strictly in the hands of government, but rather in the capable hands of visionaries and pioneers who want to get off this rockball as much as I do. At the very least, it’s in the hands of people who know there’s money to be made out there, and only the bold can cash in. Either way, we win.

In another article at CNN.com, it looks like the best use for this new technology may be an even older problem: the ISS is filling up with junk.

With no garbage pickup by shuttles for nearly two years, the international space station is looking more and more like a cluttered attic.

“Room limited,” is how the affable astronaut Mike Fincke describes it.

The problem is, shuttle deliveries and pickups won’t resume until spring, and that’s if NASA is lucky. A barrage of hurricanes and their devastating blow to NASA’s launch site may well delay the next shuttle flight, by Discovery.

So the stuff will keep piling up and up.

Considering that SpaceShipOne launches out of the desert, I think the folks over at Scaled Composites might consider looking into designing a space-faring garbage scow. While certain items can be ‘tossed’ out to burn up upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, much of the clutter consists of broken or unused equipment left over from previous experiments. Kind of like my garage, now that I think about it.

Maybe NASA should hold a rummage sale to pad the budget.

Made some adjustments top the layout of the comments pop-up, justifying the text and losing the “HTML allowed” blurb. Let me know what you think about it.

For those that may not have seen this published in your favorite magazine:

Excerpts from the GLAT: Google Labs Aptitude Test

4.) You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike. There is a dusty laptop there with a weak wireless connection. There are dull, lifeless gnomes strolling about. What dost thou do?

• A) Wander aimlessly, bumping into obstacles until you are eaten by a grue.
• B) Use the laptop as a digging device and tunnel to the next level.
• C) Play MPoRPG until the battery dies along with your hopes.
• D) Use the computer to map the nodes of the maze and discover an exit path.
• E) Email your resume to Google, tell the lead gnome you quit and find yourself a whole different world.

9.) This space left intentionally blank. Please fill it with something that improves upon emptiness.

18.) What’s the coolest hack you’ve ever written?

Oh, alas and alack that I am not a programmer!

Few things drive me more batty than boredom. Here’s some of the results of my attempt to thwart it:

Friday the 17th, I received 161 hits, most of them in the 7am hour. No idea why, I haven’t downloaded the raw logs yet. The previous Wednesday, however, I got hardly anything. I am still baffled about why nobody ever posts a comment to this blog with all the traffic it gets.

Ego-surfing can find some strange things indeed – my post regarding swapping out washing machines showed up on an appliances website. Posts I made to a play-by-post Cyberpunk game in 2001 still show up. The scary thing is, someone has taken the time to condense all of those posts into a sort of narrative, proving that there are folks out there who outstrip my nerdiness.

But not by much. I spent 20 minutes doing algebra in an effort to plan the improvements to an RPG character. And let’s face it – I did go ego-surfing, after all. In my garage. On a wireless laptop. That I left running all day so I wouldn’t have to wait for it to boot.

I lose 9 out of 10 games of solitaire, and 5 out of 7 games of mahjong. I do pretty good at Klickety, though.

While installing a wireless network for a customer this morning, I realized that every time I have done this, I have found an unprotected wireless network nearby. Usually, it’s a Linksys. And people wonder how identity theft can be so easy.

Which reminds me, I need to call that cop back.

And get some sleep.

Just went through and upgraded my WordPress install from 1.0.2 to 1.2 – there may have been a couple things I missed, so please let me know if something doesn’t work.

New to the site is the pop-up comments form – no more whole-new-page crap. I even managed to make it look purty :) Oh, there’s another thing: no more smiliey graphics. It turns out I prefer the text kind.