Fail again, fail better

Cheers from San Francisco!

This just in from Amélie: if you miss the last train from London to Reading you’re likely to be subject to the attention of perverts or find yourself in a dodgy restroom with wasted chicks. Don’t do that!

As the deadline for submission of our practical projects is nearing, we’re all fighting daily with FontLab, which in its Mac version provides for a bit of a bumpy ride. Below, my computer had enough of all the crashing and sent me a message about what it thinks failure is: 

fail = FontLab

The amazing Amanda Lear

Kwabena Boahen – a researcher at Stanford University – is using the human brain as the blueprint for designing radically more powerful and energy-efficient computers optimised to simulate neuron activity. In this short demo, Boahen describes how his Brains in Silicon lab at Stanford University has created computer chips with “synapses” and “neurons” – and how these chips might allow us to simulate the activities of the human brain. In his demo he shows how to teach character recognition to the chip, and then how the chip uses it’s learning to correctly identify the letterform.

Indeed a very interesting glimpse into the workings of brains as they ‘read’.