think or thwim

This is the story of how biology and technology will combine to create a new kind of human.

The remaining parts are available at YouTube.

Major topics:

• Ray Kurzwiel - the 2029 singularity.
• John Chapin - remote controlled rats.
• Miguel Nicolelis - implanted electrodes into monkey’s brains to allow them to control robotic arms using their thoughts.
• Philip Kennedy - Eric Ramsey was paralyzed and lost the ability to speak. Kennedy has implanted electrodes into Eric’s brain to allow him to speak thru a computer.
• Hugo de Garis - artilects (artificial intellects), god-like machines.
• Henry Markram - copying a rat’s brain one nueron at a time. His virtual brain is about 1 year away from completion.
• Seth Lloyd - quantum computers.
• Ted Kosinski (unibomber) - the one man revolution against it all.

Here’s the best search terms people used to find this blog last week:

• “high functioning autism” + airport
• blog about a cat
• man man youtube
• t
• i want to do the news man park youtube

Don’t touch the red squares.

Play the Game

:: Ze Frank

Gap Minder World

In February 2006, Hans Rosling’s gave a stunning TED Presentation demonstrating the GapMinder data visualization interface.

Toward the end of his talk, Rosling said that the world needs a search function to help find data to be analyzed. A couple weeks later Ola Rosling gave a much longer presentation at Google, and Google started hosting an on-line flash version of the GapMinder software. So far they haven’t added anything to it that I can see, but I expect great things.

:: G A P M I N D E R They win for coolest logo at the top of a webpage.

:: Hans Rosling’s Blog

While working at the music and neuroimaging lab at Beth Israel/Harvard Medical School in Boston, I developed a quick online way to screen for the tonedeafness. It actually turned out to be a pretty good test to check for overall pitch perception ability. The test is purposefully made very hard, so excellent musicians rarely score above 80% correct. Give it a try!

-JakeMandell.com

Take the Test

Areas are re-scaled to show the relative statistics:

Private Health Spending

HIV Prevalence

Tourist Destinations

Total Children

Total Elderly

Clothing Exports

Clothing Imports

:: Worldmapper