NASA goes metric! The ISS remains in limbo.

It appears NASA has used the metric system extensively since 1990, but now they've decided to not use anything else. NASA finally goes metric, so what a good oportunity to rant this is.

How about the funding? In 2002 the entire NASA funding was less than 15 billion, in 2006 it reached 16.5 billion. The total cost of the war in Iraq is 350 billion and climbing, with an estimated 600 billion in 2010. The International Space Station seems lost in bureaucracy limbo, and this site suggests the highly inflated figure of its cost reaches 100 billion. So what does that mean? That we could have skipped the Iraq war altogether and build six space stations instead? I am sure this is not the case. Because actually building six stations instead of one would have used only once the cost of design, aproximately the same people and each part would have been built cheaper than the ones before. Critics say that the cost of the ISS goes well above the first cost estimations and compare it to MIR, which has cost only 4.3billion. Well, that may be true, but doesn't that mean that we could have skipped the war in Iraq altogether (well, actually not all of it, Kuweit still had to be liberated) and build over 100 MIR stations?! Or finance 30 years of NASA budgets!

Well, had to be done. I feel much better now. Thank you, I will pay for the damages.

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Sonic pollution and ear plugs...

A couple of weeks ago I bought myself some ear plugs, the kind that you stick into your ears, they expand like a sponge, and filter all but the loudest or low frequency sounds. At the time I was half ashamed of my reasons for buying it; first of all I planned to use them in bed, when I wanted to read and my wife wanted to browse the TV channels; second of all I wanted to filter out chit-chatting women and teensters from the tramway or buses. Yeah, I know, I sound like a grumpy old man, and that was the reason I was half ashamed of doing this.

However, now, after testing this new gadget and finding new applications every day, I am happy I made the purchase. I can read on my way to work in total silence, even with people talking and laughing as hard as they can in order for others to notice them, or people listening to music so loud on their headphones that you can't escape the sound even if moving further away. These babies even filter out the manele ring tones, spat out loudly by the latest model of cell phone.

Today I was especially glad I had my plugs on, since I boarded a bus that had the radio on. Pop music, silly monotone dance rhythms, loud and useless commercials that are even more spammy than spam email for the single reason you can't close your ears... they all went away. I now have that smug feeling of superiority about my ear plugs as I have about TV after getting Internet broadband and only downloading what I want and refusing to gulp all the idiotic programming the popular stations feed us.

Ear plugs rock!

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Coins, applied to neural networks

I have always been fascinated by the concepts of Artificial Intelligence. I truly think that computerised brains are the next step of evolution, as biology (hindered by outdated morals, also) will never develop or evolve quickly enough. But enough of that.

I was thinking the other day of artificial neural networks, the electronic analogy to a brain, and the fact that for N neurons, you get to have N*M connections, where M is the average number of connections a neuron makes, which are in fact the important parts.

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Let's assume that we can simulate exactly a human neuron on a computer. We would have to have 100 billion of these simulated neurons to simulate a brain. Each neuron would have to be connected to at least 10000 others. That means one million billion connections. Imagine you could put the entire information of a neuronal link on a single byte and you would still need 1000 TB of storage. Multiply this value with the real number of bytes necessary to encode the information of a neural link. But it doesn't stop here. You would need to update this entire huge quantity of data in real time, as the brain itself is a parallel processor, not a sequential one.

Now, this is only an idea, Haven't thought it through, but if history is anything to go by, I will quickly forget it, so I'll just write it up. What if we could use a discreet interval for describing neural connections? Kind of like when paying money. You make thousands of payments every day, but you use only a finite number of coin and banknote values. Assume you want to operate a change on a neural link. You want to weaken it and make it twice less important or you want to make it twice as strong. Imagine the link is a money value, like 1$. Then you would weaken it to 50 cents or make it a strong 2$. But there is no two dollar bill, so you create another one dollar link.

The advantages of this, as far as I thought of it, are that you would have 10000 or more connections for each neuron, but only 6 or 10 types of them. So instead of operating 10000 operations, you would use only one operation per type. It also allows for different link operations, not only multiplications (as neural weights normally are used for). Maybe type 1 through 5 performs multiplications, but type 6 makes a logarithmic operation or something.

So the main advantage is that the entire structure can be scaled better. The only thing I can compare this with is a supermarket chain. You have thousands of customers and millions of transactions, but you have only three loyalty card types and only ten demographic groups that you compute your strategy on.

Now, of course, I will have to figure out the math of it, which I was never particularly good at, and the first problem I see is that each neuron will have to have its own neural neighbourhood lists and that might prove trickier than just making a note of each connection. However, since connections can only be of a certain type, compression of neural data is much easier, operations faster, as each list functions as an information index in a database.

Maybe all this is something trivial for a neural network scientist or I am just full of useless thoughts, but I'll note them nonetheless.

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Favourite blogs...

I've created a small section of posts from my favourite blogs. Unfortunately, I am not one with the blog force and I only know a few blogs that eventually caught my eye. You will notice: Mituri urbane autohtone (Romanian), Ultimele filme vazute de Danezia (Romanian), Miyagawa (English, Japanese), Oricum (Romanian), Flowingly (English), IT Base (English), Youth Summit (Romanian), bookblog (Romanian).

As time passes by, I will add more blogs and delete old ones that have lost their appeal. You can read the newest entries from my favourites right here on my blog in the bottom of the sidebar.

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Multiply any two numbers by drawing lines on paper! Amazing video

Learn how to multiply any two numbers (preferably with small digits) by drawing lines on paper.

Also check this out: Another Graphical Multiplication Trick

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How to get rich with AdSense and Blogger!!

It's easy! Write a lot of bullshit about how to get rich quickly using simple steps and with no effort. Explain in an 8 part article that says absolutely nothing how putting AdSense in your blog can increase your income. Tell everyone about it, making sure they know they will earn a huge amount of money just by reading your blog entry about getting rich. Explain how people earn lots more money than your six digit figure from blogging, but they don't share their secret for success, only you do. Then just enable AdSense in your blogspot account and see money pouring in! It's easy, simple steps, no effort... bla bla bla

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Leave your comments here.

I've created this post in order for it to be a general comment repository. If you have something to say to me, please add a comment to this article and I will answer. You can even subscribe to the Atom comment feed.

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