Ewan's Corner

Posts Tagged ‘science’

Wired News: It’s Alive (ish). The whole concept of these living neural network “animats” freaks me out a bit. I know it’s just a small nervous system rather than a real brain, but still – the results point to some kind of awareness – bizarre and eerie indeed. They next hope to try and make the animats learn, and network multiple animates… when do you stop – if at all? I’m all for furthering our understanding of the brain, but this casual “let’s see what happens” attitude bothers me.

Researchers have found that lab-grown neuron cultures tend to fire in bizarrely synchronized, dishwide waves, eerily echoing the neural patterns seen during Alzheimer’s disease.
“It’s possible that this is a state of arrested development,” Potter said, “or that the networks are asleep because they’re missing the parts (humans) use to wake up. It’s (also) possible that the networks are in some sort of epileptic state.”

Related: The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies (PDF),
MEART, Wikipedia (sparse) Animat topic.

The establishment of the South African Space Agency has been given the go-ahead. A NASA it will never be, but it’s still exciting and necessary IMHO (my wife would disagree :-) Primary focus will be on setting up a general space policy and astronomical research – we already have world-class achievements to be proud of in this area (the Square Kilometre Array, Hartebeesthoek Radio Astronomy Observatory, SALT which I’ve blogged about before).
Related local posts: Commentary
Related Google news stories

Finding Design in Nature, by Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna (free registration to the NYT required). As a Christian (and even before I was born again) I also can’t accept that evolution is totally unplanned, unguided and essentially random. Apart from depressing, I think believing that would take more faith than the alternative!

Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection – is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

I definitely believe that evolution is a valid scientific theory, with plenty of proof behind it, and also plenty of gaps in what we know and understand about it. I also believe that there is no way we, and most other forms of life on this planet, could have evolved entirely by random chance. God’s amazing handiwork is everywhere if you only open your eyes and look around with an open mind and heart.
On an unrelated note, if all goes well the Shuttle launches today at 05:50:53 p.m. South African time. Oh, for a proper NASA TV feed…