4.06.2013

Artificial Retina - Bionic Eye

A fundamental flaw with the design of the artificial retina system - the camera is headfixed. It should have a servo that mimics eye movements accounting for both saccades, the VOR, pursuit etc. I'm sure the subjects would have an easier time orienting - the are now learning a completely erroneous (re evolutionary normal) sensory signal that is incongruous with the active gaze.

Evolution as a Black Swan

It occurred to me that perhaps trying to explain the highly improbably case of our existence (owing to the confluence of improbable events that natural selection deals with) might be an unnecessary task. Unnecessary in the sense that the only reason we are trying to figure it out is because we exist - and we exist because we happen to be the outlier in the distribution of events in the universe. Aren't we just the lottery winner wondering "how could we be so lucky?" when in the end someone had to win the lottery...or rather - if someone won the lottery that someone would inevitably wonder about how lucky they are? I need to see if academics in the field discuss existence in this manner. I would assume Nassim Taleb does...but I haven't found it online. After all - the term "Black Swan" itself comes from an evolutionary example! People address Black Swans in evolution - but I'm not sure if they talk about it in terms of the sequence of all the evolutionary events leading to the present. Hmm - maybe I should actually see if people talk about it in terms of the primordial soup and the event of the first self-replicating substance being a Black Swan. I'm sure someone must.   

4.02.2013

ok

then the cost of digital files should be reduced accordingly