Too Late To Be First

Chart the course of post- Moore's Law chip design

Whoa. Just back from the most recent Palo Alto Colloquia over at Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center.

Dr. Kwabena Boahen, Stanford University, is an extraordinarily articulate man of humble demeanor, possessed of some of the most noble goals in this segment of industry. "We have two synergistic goals: We wish to understand how brains work; this will enable us to replace damaged neural tissue. And we want to build computers that work like brains; this will enable us to increase computational power a million fold."

Reliance upon abstraction as the primary means of managing circuit complexity is approaching the boundaries of its useful limits as, "Nanoelectronic technology promises to cram a trillion transistors onto a 1 cm² chip." Nature provides instructive alternatives for managing such complexity.

A couple of pivotal conceptual breakthroughs that caught my attention:

Don't morph neural circuits into silicon, morph the rules that build the circuits.
Once a chip leaves the fab, no circuit changes are possible. Softwires make post-production self-configuring circuits possible.

I might briefly and crudely describe softwires as RAM gates, but the slides do a much better job of illustrating this innovation. The slides are going up on internal Lockheed site in the next day or so, but public access won't be available until next week, so be sure to check back for them. This is mostly pre-hippocampal emulation in silicon, but the NeuroGrid project will significantly expand applied understanding and emulation of the brain's processes that create meaning and context from received stimuli.

At least, that's how I understood the talk.

Create a personal library-quality catalog

LibraryThing beta: "Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things."

Now taking wagers as to how long before acquired by Google Books.

Make Inconvenient More Convenient

As the adage goes, "If wishes were horses, then dreamers would ride," and this entry would strictly adhere to our posting guidelines. Fortunately, the guidelines clearly state that we are free to arbitrarily modify or fecklessly ignore them to suit our fancy; hence, it is too late to be first to articulate this excellent strategy, but not too late to actually DO it! Tragically, this strikes me as one the many great ideas which fall into the category "makes way too much sense for the bureaucracies involved to ever implement." Still, in keeping with our supremely sardonic mission to dash the hopes of the perpetually undaunted it's well worth repeating.

Voice + Blog + Phone + Embed player widget thingie

If you've seen an earlier RELIABLE implementation of Snapvine.com, let me know so credit accrues where it's due.

Top the Largest Freefall Formation

More sky firsts. In February 2006, the World Team broke the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) Largest Freefall Formation record, with 400 skydivers linked together thousands of feet above Thailand. Fuggetaboutit.

Survive direct contact with the vacuum of space

From Ebullism at 1 Million Feet: "Could an astronaut ever suffer direct contact with space, bleed out into the vacuum, and survive? In fact, one already has. Posting to sci.space, Gregory Bennett wrote:

'Incidentally, we have had one experience with a suit puncture on the Shuttle flights. On STS-37, during one of my flight experiments, the palm restraint in one of the astronaut’s gloves came loose and migrated until it punched a hole in the pressure bladder between his thumb and forefinger. It was not an explosive decompression, just a little 1/8 inch hole, but it was exciting down here in the swamp because it was the first injury we’ve ever had from a suit incident. Amazingly, the astronaut in question didn’t even know the puncture had occurred; he was so hopped on adrenaline it wasn’t until after he got back in that he even noticed there was a painful red mark on his hand. He figured his glove was chafing and didn’t worry about it…. What happened: when the metal bar punctured the glove, the skin of the astronaut’s hand partially sealed the opening. He bled into space, and at the same time his coagulating blood sealed the opening enough that the bar was retained inside the hole.' (41)"

Sky Jump Auckland

THERE'S NOTHING ELSE LIKE IT - A WORLD FIRST!

"Skyjump is a whole new way of falling off things. Jumpers wear a "flying suit" and full body harness. They are then clipped to the jump cable by professional Jumpmasters and simply "step off"! The cable drum rotates as the cable feeds out, causing air resistance against fan blades on the end of the drum. This means Jumpers are effectively riding on a cushion of air. Jumpers fall very quickly until near the ground then decelerate to a safe landing speed. Ground rush is awesome!"

Or, if Auckland is inconvenient and you desire an equivalent effect, just go out and start a new job ... or make that new hire which YOU know is right, even if the team is a little freaked out. It's always back to risk/reward, isn't it? Especially if you want to be first or Stay First, in anything. Onward!

Unfungle Mungled Computers : : Pay Only if Happy

Debuggler is a documented case of damned brilliant branding. For those interested, the rationale for the name is instructive, as well.

If followed by happy customers, and sustainable profits, that could be a first. Debuggling is surely one of the more challenging and emotionally hazardous jobs in the world, for it is not easy to leave customers with warm fuzzy feelings when solving one issue only reveals another; as is too often the case in this thankless trade. It's a bold idea to do this online with the pay only when happy policy.