Viewing profile — bl

Oops. You're correct: a 2x1 vector is two-dimensional, a 3x1 vector is three-dimensional, etc. Each element of the mx1 vector represents a magnitude along an orthogonal dimension (…

I'll give a try... Imagine three, 4-by-1 vectors, each "one-dimensional". Twelve total scalars, each vector with four rows and one column. Arrange these three vectors side by side …

Drat! I committed an error similar to the one I was griping against: being technically sloppy. Believe it or not, I paused for half a heartbeat while typing fixed and triangulation…

The Mosers' work is very much deserving recognition. They've made fundamental discoveries with really beautiful experiments (well-designed, well-executed, thorough). On a personal …

I like your gist of putting the hypothesis to test, but there are serious practical factors that would prevent your proposed experiments. Small- and medium-sized mammals (e.g., rod…

I hope no one interpreted my statements to suggest that anything you said was wrong. Just trying to fill in details. I merely want to avoid prematurely narrowing the range of funct…

"Processing" doesn't have a consensus definition in the neuroscience community, but a neuroscientist could, with good justification, use that definition if they had a particular ex…

"[I]t looks I could design a dendritic tree geometry for almost any boolean function of the inputs". That's my outlook on the structure-function link between dendritic morphology a…

The voltage change (i.e., depolarization) is not strictly local. In some cases, depending on the actual geometry of the dendrite and the particular complement of voltage-activated …

If you are interested in making a very stretched analogy, demonstrating dendritic information processing is like realizing that a CPU's transistor is actually itself a little CPU t…

Mr. Park's original piece on slopegraphs: http://charliepark.org/slopegraphs/ Previous Hacker News discussion of Mr. Park's original piece: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2753…

Strictly speaking, there is still some cell division shortly after birth and into the early phases of post-natal development. So the brain increases in size, slightly, via that met…

Synapse "rewiring" is not typically how we think memories are formed in adult animals. Mostly it is done by modulating the strengths of the existing connections (this process invol…

"[I]t's a bit of a stretch to say that they've rewritten the rules of refraction." Indeed. It appears more akin to the situation we have with classical and quantum mechanics: class…

"[T]hese companies do nothing for us." I agree 99%. The one thing they do for us, and the one thing that any alternative system would have to replicate, is provide a signal of qual…

I'd be very interested to know more details about the structure of the RAM units. (Neither the original article nor the IBM press release at http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/press…

If you are used to CoffeScript and python and feel like you're trudging through syrup when you work on HTML, you might check out SHPAML ( http://shpaml.webfactional.com/ ). I found…

Sorry to be pessimistic, but my sense is, "No, there will not be a Steve Jobs of biotechnology." Mr. Jobs has done a remarkable job producing sleek, fun-to-use, affordable, somewha…

My goodness, was that a terrible omission on my part.

I may have made a mistake: risky and methodical are orthogonal. Space flight is inherently dangerous and the thousands of smart NASA workers were surely aware of the natural danger…

Apart from the sheer awe of landing on the moon with that era's technology and the resulting scientific harvest, I am fascinated by the engineering process. I can't settle on wheth…

I quite agree: I don't think megapixels will get us very far, if we could even formulate a consensus definition. I much prefer a perception/discrimination measure, as you said, and…