Mokele

The muscles contract, pulling on bones. The muscles are controlled by neurons. A single pulse from the neuron will make the muscle cell twitch, but a sustained series of pulses from the neuron will make it contract smoothly.

Not entirely - muscles will twitch from a single burst from a neuron, but if the neuron fires at the muscle above a certain frequency, the muscle will just stay contracted.

I should note that muscle cell membranes are also electrically excitable, and this excitation is what stimulates contraction (hence why people convulse when shocked with electricity).

Myopia is simply improper focusing, resulting in a generally blurry image without sharp lines or contrast. I don't know enough about interference patterns to answer the other part. Mokele

We're talking about it now, actually.

Two things come to mind: 1) Many animals which are excellent at sight don't simply have a uniform array of photoreceptors, but also have a cluster in the center of the eye that has super-high-resolution, called the fovea. When humans see, we constantly move our eyes around, focusing the fovea on different points, and the brain patches it together into single high resolution image. Of course, wiggling the eyes that much would require a complex mechanical setup. 2) In most animals, there's a 'neighbor' effect. The output of a photoreceptor is more intense if those next to it are receiving a different color, which has the result of emphasizing edges. This actually happens at the level of retina, so all images your brain receives essentially go through this simple edge-enhancing program before they get there.

Well, no matter what else, you need to know the mass of the ball in order to find Watts. However, you could make assumptions about human arm length, which could get you what you need.

Ok, guys, this is getting *way* off-topic.

IMHO, you'll find much more success focusing on stereoscopic vision than on shading for spatial perception. A lot of animals have vision that's too poor to really resolve shading, but can easily figure out distances via having 2 (or more) eyes.

But how to couple them? Feed the cable up from the ground? Down from space? The former has problems with supporting it as you move it up, while the latter has problems with air resistance and shifting the satellite's center of gravity.

Sione, your definitions are simply wrong, and do not accord with those used by any workers in the field. You cannot simply make up new meanings for words in order to prove a point. That's like if I 'proved' turtles are the fastest land animals by re-classifying the cheetah as a type of turtle.

Show me. Give me the journal citations, and I'll look them up and post the full text for everyone here to read for themselves. Mokele

Psycho - Microbes naturally exist which feed on oil seeps and we've completely sequenced the genome of one of these bacteria

Ok, so, I'm presuming everyone is familiar with space elevators, as they've been discussed here plenty of times, so I thought I'd pose a special challenge. Imagine we have all the parts - we have the ground station, the satellite, the elevator, and the super-strong cable. How do you put it all together?

Because it was a collection of random gibberish devoid of any sort of coherent thought.

That's actually an interesting question: in a natural system, without humans, what happens to oil? Plants won't use it, because they get their carbon from atmospheric CO2. Animals sure won't. The only naturally accessible points I can think of are tar pits.

The vomiting is caused by metabolic acidosis from excessive strain. Your body is basically over-riding all conscious control in an effort to fix the problem. It's also a sign that you're over-doing your workout, and should ease back. Constantly screwing with your body's pH can cause heart damage.

I guarantee there is zero chance of that happening. Biological systems are simply too large to take advantage of quantum effects without it all getting averaged out. The first thing that cropped up in google: http://cercor.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/4/422 Reading visual cortex of the human brain Well, there's simple motor output - We can train monkeys to use a robot arm via implants in the motor cortex However, what you're talking about, inferring higher-level cognitive function, is only really possible via indirect methods such as observing behavior. Possibly in an AI, it would be simpler, because you could essentially watch all the parts move as they do some complex task, but in a living brain, we can only correlate due to technological and ethical barriers. There is no evidence whatsoever for any sort of 'spiritual brain', nor any evidence for any role of EM fields in the brain as information storage. Also, the experiments that discovered the basis of learning have been in organisms with very simple nervous systems. We can read their thoughts because they only have a few hundred neurons total. I don't think your definitons are very good. Emotion, for instance, is a cognitive bias in output in response to a particular input, and has nothing to do with memory - amnesiacs still have emotions. Instincts also have nothing to do with emotions - they're simply automatic behavior patterns and pre-programmed drives. Your definition of intelligence is useless, because it requires a definition of thought. And you define consciousness so broadly that any motor command is evidence of it, and even jellyfish are conscious. A virus isn't alive. And neither bacteria nor trees even have nervous systems, meaning your brain-based definitions *automatically* leave them out. It depends on the nature of the injury that put them in that coma. Some are nothing but shells, totally brain dead. Others have rudimentary or chaotic brain activity. And some have the truly horrifying experience of being fully aware and trapped inside a body that doesn't respond. I think the point Sione is trying to raise is an interesting one: How do you *know* if an AI is intelligent or conscious? How can you test it? Especially if you're trying to evaluate someone else's claim to have made one? The Turing test only gets you so far, after all. Mokele

It's actually called MATLAB because it's all matrix math and operations, which sounds weird and takes a lot of getting used to, but is quite powerful. When I took a machine vision course, we used it exclusively, and in my current lab, we use a special program developed for it for image analysis. Back when I took the machine vision course, I had one bit of input for the class as the sole biologist, and I think it may have helped - don't shoot for human-level. Humans actually have *amazingly* good day vision for animals, only outdone by birds. Most animals do quite well with far less resolution and less sophisticated processing. So basically, don't overshoot. Mokele

And? Biological systems are *very* sloppy, and neurons have a one-bit output, on or off. Think of a neuron like this: imagine a bucket tied to a springy light switch. The bucket has water always flowing in, but has a hole in the bottom. When other neurons fire at it, they add an extra set quantity of water. Sometimes it's enough to fill the bucket and flip the switch, other times it takes several additions, and sometimes it takes several neurons all at once to make another fire. Other processes can either change the rate of the constant water flowing in or change the size of the hole. What you're talking about amounts to tracking individual water molecules in the buckets - it doesn't matter and cannot substantially affect the output. Remember, biology isn't optimal. Most systems are fairly sloppy, and some are so badly cobbled together it's amazing they even work at all. Um, what? What does momentum have to do with neurons. Nothing. With animals. We've been sticking wires into animal's brains for decades now, and we know a LOT. We can actually *read* the visual stimuli a monkey sees directly from its brain. We've mapped the entire nervous system of several simpler animals. Also, humans have a knack for doing stupid shit that causes brain damage, which in turn allows us to actually observe the effects of damage to particular clusters of neurons. 'Consciousness' is a tricky term. Emotions, however, are simple. They're literally nothing more than cognitive reflexes, no more special or complex than withdrawing your hand from a hot stove. Adding emotions to a computer is simple - simply program it to bias its responses towards a particular form upon receiving a certain input. If I make a random number generate only spit out even numbers, I've basically given it emotion. Obviously. Compound A + Compound B = Compound C. Neither. It's been well established via animal experiments that information is encoded into the nervous system by physical rearrangement of the connections between neurons and by alterations of the properties of individual neurons (see the leaky bucket analogy - basically permanently changing hole size or input flow). EM fields in the majority of animals are byproducts of cellular activity, with no usefulness to the animal itself (the exceptions obviously being electric fish such as knifefish, etc.) It depends how you define the terms, but the first three, definitely not, as they lack a nervous system. Squid are iffy - some cephalopods are smarter than rats and mice. Birds, dogs and dolphins have been empirically observed displaying behavioral tendencies which suggest cognitive processes similar to human emotions. That assumes those are necessary for consciousness and/or intelligence. That's like saying that a beak is necessary for flight because birds have one and they fly - just because humans have certain cognitive traits doesn't mean they're necessary or even useful to an AI. We can, have, and have been studying it in detail for close to 30 years. Brain activity is the pattern of firing of neurons. We can directly observe it via FMI and PET scans, the latter of which are becoming higher and higher resolution, allowing us closer and closer to a neuron-by-neuron map of brain activity. We can also use electromyography, but we don't on humans for ethical reasons (it requires implantation of wire electrodes and, usually, termination and dissection to confirm placement). How do you know we have it? How do you know it isn't illusory? We tend to imagine that there's a little 'free will' module somewhere in the brain that's somehow consciously making decisions, but there is a growing body of evidence from the imaging methods described above that we don't even make decisions - we just react, then justify it later (albeit only a few dozen milliseconds later). In short, it's possible that even *humans* are merely highly complex learning neuronal networks that spit out info based on what we're given, without any *actual* "man behind the curtain" so to speak. Perhaps the impression of 'making a decision' is just a cognitive illusion. As unflattering as it may be, it's a possibility rooted in empirical studies, and one we have to consider. Mokele

There are several textbooks on the subject that should be on amazon and/or google books. IME, MATLAB has an excellent image processing toolbox that can be programmed very efficiently. Mokele

Usually muscle - tendon tears are quite, quite nasty. The tears are also quite small relative to the muscle as a whole (though that doesn't stop them from being annoyingly painful).

Pretty much everyone can. All you're doing is triggering deep neural pathways to the sympathetic nervous system. The ears thing is just a muscle which some people can control while others can't. Mokele

False analogy - those jobs that depend upon the gender or other innate characters of a person aren't being forced to hire people who cannot do the job. No laws require that. No laws require me to hire a blind guy as a crocodile handler. But if the person's blindness does not interfere with his/her job (such as telemarketing), then I should not be able to discriminate. Apparently not, since you're so willing to trot out sexist sterotypes. IMHO, 'giving women credit' does not mean 'assuming all women are the same'. For the same reason an employer shouldn't be able to screen out black employees "because they're less intelligent". Both positions are equally bigoted, and equally inaccurate. That a woman should be denied a job based not on her ACTUAL traits, but rather traits that are simply assumed by the sexist in charge of hiring is utterly reprehensible. And you act like there's *choice*. There isn't. If you freed employers like you wish, there would be almost no chance of most women ever getting a good job, period. Sexism is so deeply ingrained in our culture that without someone forcing their hands, nothing will change. Strawman/false analogy. These refer to traits that people CANNOT change (or should not be expected to, such as religion), not some trivial detail that can be altered at a moment's whim. Not until these inequities are solved, no. We're making a good attempt, but we aren't there yet. Your right to discriminate is superceded by both the rights of an individual to a job and the broader rights of minority groups not to be persecuted for their differences. Some things are more important than the free market, simple as that. Mokele

Mutation rates are the same because mutations are simply a chemical process that doesn't distinguish based on gene function. Essential, redundant, and useless genes all mutate at the same rate, as do the areas between genes. Selection will weed out the mutations to essential genes, unless they're beneficial, but there is no reason to expect differences in mutation rate. Yet more evidence that Mr. Borger has no clue what he's talking about. Mokele