Sunday, July 22, 2012

The Disabled And Computing

Cover of "The Diving Bell and the Butterf...
Cover of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Controlling a Computer with Your Eyes
the French author of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly dictated his memoirs solely through eye-movements--one letter at a time, and with the help of an assistant
One of the things about computing has been the help it has provided to the disabled, or rather the physically challenged. At one level we are all physically challenged. Or we would not need computers, right? Computers compute when we can't. Like Steve Jobs said, the computer is like a bicycle for the mind. We are all disabled, we all need bicycles.
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Cyrstal Clear

Human brain - midsagittal cut
Human brain - midsagittal cut (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Crystals, Information And The Origin of Life
Crystals are among the most beautiful objects in the natural word. They are well understood, ubiquitously used and much admired.... the convergence of crystallography, materials science and biology is opening up a new approach to the study of structure, form and function. ... the energy landscape in which they exist and the flow of information to and from the environment..... the information a mollusc uses to make mother of pearl; and that is determined by its genome, proteome and so on, which together they call a conchome. .... this information is a kind of algorithm or formula for producing mother of pearl, analogous to an algorithm that produces the digits of pi. ..... a similar change in thinking about form and function is also emerging in the entirely different field of robotics and artificial intelligence. .... turns out that humans perform many actions that are so quick that the human brain cannot possibly be involved .... the brain outsources the control of this movement to materials themselves.... morphological computing.
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