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Monday, March 24, 2003 |
Artificial synapse at hand. Two Standford researchers have announced the creation of a functioning artificial synapse.
Since synapses are typically around 50 nanometres across, and each chemical puff contains just a few thousand molecules, building an artificial synapse is a huge challenge. But Mark Peterman and Harvey Fishman at Stanford University in California are getting close. They told a biophysics conference in Texas earlier in March that they have created four "artificial synapses" on a silicon chip one centimetre square.
To cells on the surface of the device, the artificial synapse is simply a hole in the silicon. But each hole opens into a pipeline etched into a plastic layer on the back of the chip, connected at both ends to a reservoir of neurotransmitter. When an electric field is applied, the neurotransmitter is pumped through the pipeline, and a little of it squeezes out of the hole, stimulating nearby cells. Link Discuss (Thanks, Henry!) [Boing Boing Blog]
4:50:16 PM 
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Al-jazeera's english language website launches. Arabic-language media network Al Jazeera now offers an english version of web content here. Seems to be under construction right now, as I blog. Tip: for partial and clumsy automated translation of the content on the arabic-language version of their web content (which may contain different content than the English site), go to aljazeera.net via the Tarjim english/arabic translation tool.
The site, which has promised to offer a different perspective to Western readers, stuck to its word. Its graphic photos of dead American soldiers and pointed headlines ("Coalition of the willing has become a joke") will provide plenty of fodder for critics of the Middle Eastern news organization. Link to Wall Street Journal story, Discuss (Thanks, Numair) [Boing Boing Blog]
4:38:07 PM
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O'Reilly and Kapor on Open Source. I've posted an impressionistic transcript of the Mitch Kapor/Tim O'Reilly conversation on open source at PC Forum.
Mitch: OSS has grown up -- it's no longer just one thing. People are taking the idea in different directions: MySQL is a for-profit, OSS company that gives away 99.9% of its product. Their customers modify the technology and don't necessarily distribute the source, and pay millions for that privelege. And of course there's OSAF, a non-profit that's doing something complimentary to biz, investing in core development that people can build commercial apps atop of. We're the nonprofit piece of what will become a larger ecology.
Tim: Ecology is the best way to think about this. Don't focus on licensing -- that misses the point. OSS is about technqiues for building an architecture for collaboratively building apps, including the technique of disclosing your code. But there are lots of open-source-like Internet Era activities, like the WWW's "view source," which made it easy for anyone to copy any neat feature. It makes it easy for people to join the party, which is the heart of OSS.
The Internet is changing the way we think about software. What would it mean for Amazon or Google -- both built on OSS technology -- to release their code? The value of Amazon and Google is the giant data-center, not the software. By allowing public participation in the service, through their API, they've created an architecture of participation that is at the heart of the OSS story. It's not about free versus proprietary -- it's about how inclusive you are. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
4:33:17 PM
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Guerrilla tactics vs. US war plan. From the beginning, US war commanders have said the fight for regime change in Iraq was going to be tough, risky, and potentially costly. "Ground truth," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld likes to put it, is proving them right in the form of coalition casualties and captured soldiers. [Christian Science Monitor | Top Stories]
4:26:22 PM
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More not-quite-war blogging.
Deborah Branscum: For Shawna's Sake, Stop the Torture.
Remember Guantánamo Bay? About 650 men have been held by the US at this base in Cuba since January 2002. These men are accused of links to al-Qaeda and the former Taleban government These men al-Qaeda terrorists or they may be guilty of having been in the wrong place at the wrong time. (The AP story in the Kansas City paper details the torture of a man at Bagramat who claims to have been part of the US-backed Northern Alliance. How many guys in Cuba are there by mistake?) The US government refuses to give the detainees prisoner-of-war status and denies them access to attorneys. In a travesty of justice, the US Court of Appeals upheld the US government's position, which strips the detainees of all legal rights. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12728-2003Mar11.html [The Doc Searls Weblog]
1:08:03 PM
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© Copyright 2003 Bernie Dunham.
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