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Our Minds/Brains

My daughter told me after she had graduated from college that she had a photographic memory that all she had to do was read something and she would remember it.

I knew a person in college who had a photographic memory and he never went to class because when it came time for mid-term exams or final exams, he would just read the chapters and ACE whatever test was put in front of him.

Are people who have that skill and/or ability smarter than the rest of us?

Is having that skill and/or ability the only key to a successful career?

Personally, I had no problems remember stuff about which I was interested and that is fine as long as one has a wide range of interests which I did not have at the time was in college and to this day still don't have a wide range of interests.  But, I still had a successful career although I guess it really depends on how one quantifies success.

I suppose one could study the information and through that process remember information but I always found studying to be boring, especially those classes that were totally based upon memorizing the data.  For me, memorizing is not learning.

BUT... for what other reason have we been given a brain or mind depending upon which word sound better to you.  And, are our minds clearly our own...  that is to say do we really control our own thoughts, beliefs, and dreams?

Does the person with a photographic memory have the ability to daydream and believe that their daydreams are their own and nothing something that they read about somewhere along the way?

The same holds true for one's ideas.  Are they their ideas or someone else's idea about which they read along the way?

Does it really matter if their bosses accept their ideas and are never aware that they came about from reading another person's ideas?

Success is success I suppose no matter what the capability of one's brain/mind is...  as the key to life is getting to that point where you can retire or continue working.

Just By Imagining

An experimental device that turns thoughts into text has allowed a man who was left paralyzed by an accident to construct sentences swiftly on a computer screen.

The man was able to type with 95% accuracy just by imagining he was handwriting letters on a sheet of paper, a team reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

"What we found, surprisingly, is that [he] can type at about 90 characters per minute," says Krishna Shenoy of Stanford University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

The device would be most useful to someone who could neither move nor speak, says Dr. Jaimie Henderson, a neurosurgeon at Stanford and co-director, with Shenoy, of the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory.

"We can also envision it being used by someone who might have had a spinal cord injury who wants to use email," Henderson says, "or, say, a computer programmer who wants to go back to work."

Both Henderson and Shenoy have a proprietary interest in commercializing the experimental approach used to decode brain signals.

The idea of decoding the brain activity involved in handwriting is "just brilliant," says John Ngai, who directs the National Institutes of Health's BRAIN Initiative, which helped fund the research.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Cities Without Governments

After dominating Silicon Valley in the past two decades, hiking up rent prices in the area and filling the streets with fleece vests and wool sneakers, they’re now spreading into other regions, such as Austin and North Carolina.

But merely setting up shop in a hot new spot just isn’t enough for one group of techies, now formulating a plan to build their very own dream city – away from the US entirely and governed by themselves.

Twenty-five-year-olds Dryden Brown of New York University, and Charlie Callinan of Boston College, co-founded Bluebook Cities in 2019 — described as a “full-stack city builder,” which “partners with communities to develop beautiful, energetic, resident-owned cities,” the website states.

So far, their community remains online, in “the cloud.” But they expect to enlist around 2,000 willing participants (about the size of a small college town) to pack up and move to their yet-to-be-built city. No word yet on where the concept will touch down — but the two hope to land somewhere in the Mediterranean.

Currently, Brown and Callinan are looking to partner with a country in the region who wants to attract a slice of Silicon Valley and is “down to forge a partnership with them,” Brown told YouTuber Justin Murphy in an interview.

“Whereby they contribute land, perhaps for equity in the project and the terms will obviously be negotiated,” Brown explained. “We are not trying to be a total sovereign nation or something like that. We want to partner with a government and build something really cool that works with us and works for them and is mutually beneficial,” he said, adding that they want a government that will stop blocking people with “dumb regulations.”  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Stupidity Does Not Run In The Family

It would be extremely safe to say that my elevator does not stop at al the floor and/or that my toolbox is missing several critical tools.  In short, I am an idiot's idiot...

AND...  why do I think that?

Simply put:  it happens to be true.

Now...  while I can pour piss out of a boot with directions written on the heel, I possess little if any common sense...  which seems to be a little more critical than simply pouring piss around.

Ironically, I was taught how to build and repair computers back in the late 1990's early 2000's and did quite well at that technical assignment as I recall for at least 12 months...  but, here recently, I cannot seem to find the common sense handle.

One could say that it is twenty years later asshole, of course you have misplaced a little common sense...  but, I fear it is not that simple.

We were recently returning from an outing in Virginia and after we stopped for gas, I turned on the lights but the dashboard lights would not come on.

After screwing around trying to figure what the shit had happened since the damn things were working perfectly before we stopped, I concluded that there was an ELECTRICAL problem and since we had only 30 minutes remaining, that I would simply drive without dashboard lights.

The following day we made an appointment with Toyota in Knoxville instead of Toyota in Morristown just to make sure the technical work was done the correct way...  assuming that Knoxville's technicians were better trained than Morristown's.

I drove down to my appointment which is on the other side of Knoxville about 45 miles one way.  My Car Care Provider came to my car and I lowered the window and explained the problem.  He thought for a second or two, maybe less, and asked if he could get in.

I stood outside the car beside him with the door open and in less than 15 seconds found the dial that corrected the lights for the dashboard whether the driver wanted them bright or not so bright...  he turned the dial and the FRIGGING DASHBOARD LIGHTS CAME ON...

I REST MY CASE!!!

Burial Mounds

DNIPRO, Ukraine — Belching diesel exhaust, a bulldozer cut into a 4,000-year-old burial mound, peeling back the soil to reveal the mysteries hidden inside, including a skeleton.  

For archaeologists, this excavation in the flatlands of eastern Ukraine holds the promise of discovery. For a developer, it clears the way for new country homes.

In recent years, government archaeologists, developers and farmers, who sometimes also level burial mounds in their fields to ease plowing, have seemingly been the only parties interested in the fate of Ukraine’s vast constellation of ancient graves. And few have paid much heed to preserving the dirt piles.

Hoping to correct this history of neglect, a Ukrainian non-governmental group is agitating for the preservation of the burial mounds of Scythians and other ancient warrior cultures, partly on the grounds that they hold particular significance for a country at war today.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

My Brother From Another Mother

 

Depressed and Hopeless

While many young people have been spared from the harshest physical consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, an increasingly large volume of research suggests they are facing drastic mental health consequences.

In June 2020, the CDC released data that suggests one in four adults ages 18 to 24 have considered suicide. And according to the recently released Harvard Youth Poll of 2,513 Americans ages 18 to 29, 51% of young Americans said that at least several days in the previous two weeks they had felt down, depressed or hopeless.

“There’s been this narrative that young people are spared a lot of the impact of Covid because they’re less likely to develop real severe physical complications,” says Ellen Burstein, one of the poll’s lead researchers and a junior at Harvard. “But it’s taken a profound toll on their mental health.”

Young people reported a range of serious mental health symptoms in the Harvard survey. A startling 68% say they have little energy; 59% say they have trouble with sleep; 52% find little pleasure in doing things; 49% have a poor appetite or are over-eating; 48% have trouble concentrating; 32% are moving so slowly, or are fidgety to the point that others notice; and 28% have had thoughts of self-harm.

Approximately 35% of Black respondents and 31% of Hispanic respondents said they experience bouts of severe depression triggering thoughts that they would be better off dead or hurting themselves.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...

Justice For All

Is this the way it really is in the United States of America?

Hell no!!!

• Whites get different justice than blacks receive...
• Wealthy get different justice than the non-wealthy...
• Conservatives get different justice than liberals...
• Celebrities get different justice than non-celebrities...
• Educated get different justice than the non-educated...
• Females get different justice than males...

WHY?

Because we have a jury of our peers in the courtroom, deciding the verdict and those juries can be easily persuaded, especially if they do not want to be on the jury in the first place and want to go home as quick as possible.

BUT...  our Congressional Leaders and our Department of Justice Leaders and our Supreme Court Justices all think that we, as citizens of the United States are receiving EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER THE LAW...

To me, this only serves to demonstrate the HYPROCRISY of our system...  even a fool knows this ain't necessarily so.

Hyperdimensional Computing

The human brain has always been under study for inspiration of computing systems. Although there's a very long way to go until we can achieve a computing system that matches the efficiency of the human brain for cognitive tasks, several brain-inspired computing paradigms are being researched. 

Convolutional neural networks are a widely used machine learning approach for AI-related applications due to their significant performance relative to rules-based or symbolic approaches. Nonetheless, for many tasks machine learning requires vast amounts of data and training to converge to an acceptable level of performance.

A Ph.D. student from Khalifa University, Eman Hasan, is investigating another AI computation methodology called 'hyperdimensional computing," which can possibly take AI systems a step closer toward human-like cognition. The work is supervised by Dr. Baker Mohammad, Associate Professor and Director of the System on Chip Center (SOCC), and Dr. Yasmin Halawani, Postdoctoral Fellow.

Hasan's work, which was published recently in the journal IEEE Access, analyzes different models of hyperdimensional computing and highlights the advantages of this computing paradigm. Hyperdimensional computing, or HDC, is a relatively new paradigm for computing using large vectors (like 10000 bits each) and is inspired by patterns of neural activity in the human brain. The means by which can allow AI-based computing systems to retain memory can reduce their computing and power demands.  TO READ MORE, ClICK HERE...

Who's Pulling the President's Strings?

Most of the Democrats whether they are liberal or progressive or not are going to support the Democratic Party regardless of what happens to this country because they do not want to admit that they might be or actually are wrong.  

The mainstream media echoes that sentiment.

AND...  that represents 50% of the current population regardless of the fact that President Biden claims a majority of people support this or that...

Why do I think this?

Because, 50% of the current population voted for Trump in 2020 and I doubt if they would have changed their minds this quickly.

However, I believe that Biden is simple a Presidential PUPPET and that the VP Kamala Harris is pulling his strings...  BUT...  she is not really in charge either because someone is pulling her strings...

And...  that group is a combination of political leaders both current and past as well as some millionaires and billionaires like Bezos and Gates who would undoubtedly feel more comfortable is there was a ONE WORLD GOVERNMENT that they could control behind the scenes.

I also believe that the media unknowingly is supporting this movement.   AND THAT, black lives matter, the cancel culture, critical race theory, and the WOKE Mob is simply a way that these POWER BROKERS keep the citizens of the US divided and at each other throats rather than united working towards a common future.

It is also very interesting that now that a SPACE FORCE has been created that our government is admitting to the fact that UFO's have been around for decades.

STAGFLATION

 Stagflation means:::>  persistent high inflation combined with high unemployment and stagnant demand in a country's economy...

The President typically associated with stagflation was JIMMY CARTER...  now, we have an opportunity to have it associated with JOE BIDEN.

Stagflation occurs when the government or central banks expand the money supply at the same time they constrain supply. It can also occur when a central bank's monetary policies create credit. ... Both increase the money supply and create inflation.

WHO IS THIS GOING TO HURT?

Everyone who is not a millionaire or a billionaire...  while all the rest of us, who are not in these privilege categories...  will pay the price for this economic situation through increased prices and a dollar that continues to be devalued.

EXAMPLE:  Just a few weeks ago, we were paying right around #2/gallon for gasoline here in the TN Valley and sometimes it dropped below $2/gallon...  and now, it is $3/gallon....

THANK YOU JOE BIDEN AND KAMALA...