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Interesting Statistical Data Resource

Check out http://www.facster.com/ -- it's a site that provides some cool features on top of the US Statistical Abstracts and State Abstracts data-sets. This site seems to be just the kind of "statistics portal" I daydreamed about a while back. Very useful idea.

New Technique may Cure All Cancers

Scientists in England claim remarkable results in a new approach to fighting cancer that is based on modifying a patient's T-cells to better target cancerous cells. The approach may provide a cure for all types of cancer "within 5 years." Wow, let's hope so. This could really be an important breakthrough.

Scale-Free Networks and Mobile Services

Here is an interesting article about an analysis of SMS messaging versus e-mail messaging on mobile networks. The conclusion is that e-mail messaging is more efficient for mobile consumers because email networks are scale-free networks. The article predicts that services based on scale-free topologies will ultimately win out over less optimal alternatives. Thanks to Murli.

About Sony's Brain Stimulation Patent

A number of readers sent me links this week about the new Sony patent for ultrasonic neural stimulation.  It is definitely interesting and could represent a useful new approach to non-invasive brainstate manipulation. However, it is by no means anywhere near being useful for entertainment, virtual reality, or mind control. Our understanding of how the brain works is still far too primitive. Even if the Sony technology was actually working (which it is not, by the way -- it is just an idea, no working prototype was built or tested), it would be a long time before we would know where to aim it. By the time neuroscience has reached a point where thoughts can be stimulated reliably by an external source, this Sony patent and its continuations will have long-since expired. I am guessing we are at least 100 years away from having enough of an understanding of the brain for such a technology to be applicable to mass markets. Meanwhile it might be a useful tool for research -- it's certainly more precise than magnetic stimulation, and it is a lot less damaging than creating physical lesions. It will be interesting to see where this goes, if anywhere. But even if it does go somewhere, there is a chance that mere neural stimulation may not be enough to generate fully-immersive states of consciousness. While such stimulation may trigger particular memories or maybe even perceptual experiences, the complexity required to generate a complete experience -- encompassing all sensory modalities and with enough internal detail and logical consistency to be believable -- is far beyond what we can presently even imagine. In the end, I think it would be more fruitful to leverage the brain's ability to generate dreams than to attempt to build conscious experiences from scratch. We should really do more research into the mechanism of dreaming, and in particular, into the mechanisms of lucid dreaming. By combining hypnosis with lucid dreaming we can create completely immersive states of consciousness today, without any special technology or neural stimulation. And these "simulations" are already far richer and more interactive than anything Sony will come up with in the next several hundred years.

Cool Visualizations of Electromagnetic Fields

These visualizations were produced at MIT -- they look like modern art but are actually visualizations of electromagnetic fields. Pretty!