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A critical view on Prof. Markram's Blue Brain project (in German).

As far as I know it's sort of like "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens"... i.e. a waste of taxpayer's money... Able to heal Alzheimer... Yeah... Actually I was on the conference the author is mentioning (FET 2011) and I have seen the presentations of all 6 flagship proposals. Following that I had a discussion with one of my colleagues about the existence of limits of the amount of bullshit politicians are willing to buy from scientists. Will there be a point at which politicians, despite their total ignorance, will realise that scientists simply don't deliver anything they promise? How long will we (scientists) be stuck in the viscous circle of have-to-promise-more-than-predecessors in order to get money? Will we face a situation when we'll be forced to revert to promises which are realistic? To be honest none of the 6 presentations convinced me of their scientific merit (apart from the one on graphene where I have absolutely no expertise to tell). Apparently a huge amount of money is about to be wasted.

It's not just "Let's construct an enormous dynamical system and see what happens", it's worse! Also the simulation of the cosmological evolution is/was a little bit of this type, still the results are very interesting and useful. Why? Neither the whole cosmos nor the human brain at the level of single neurons can be modelled on a computer, that would last aeons on a "yet-to-be-invented-extra-super-computer". Thus one has to make assumptions and simplifications. In cosmology we have working theories of gravitation, thermodynamics, electrodynamics etc. at hand; starting from these theories we can make reasonable assumptions and (more or less) justified simplifications. The result is valuable since it provides insight into a complex system under given, explicit and understood assumptions. Nothing similar seems to exist in neuroscience. There is no theory of the human brain and apparently nobody has the slightest idea which simplifications can be made without harm. Of course, Mr. Markram remains completely unaffected of ''details'' like this. Finally, Marek, money is not wasted, we ''build networks of excellence'' and ''select the brightest of the brightest'' to make them study and work at our ''elite institutions'' :-). I lively remember the stage of one of these "bestofthebest" from Ivy League at the ACT...

I always new it - the future of telecom is with pigeons ... (what happened to our idea of the pigeon inspired navigator??)

Well, it's been newn... I mean known since computer networks were invented that it'll take them a long time to match with a throughput of a train carrying recorded media. The point is that throughput is not the only important parameter: the other is response time... (BTW let's see how this commenting feature works, not many folks seem to use it...)

I do use it quite regularily .... a train full of DVDs and flash drives, yes ok - but a pigeon!!!!

A collection of crazy scientific ideas.

Looks like a combo of several ideas in our stock: nanomat + dna + self assembly...

A tool to compare texts for similarities.

article written a bit as if they had invented rectennas ... they are used since the 60s (Brown powered a small helicopter via 2.45 GHz ... and Kaya-san has showed wireless power transmission via advanced rectenna's at almost every SPS conference since 20 years ...