Soupy Sales dead at 83

Soupy Sales, comedian and radio-TV personality best known for his childrens' TV show, Lunch with Soupy Sales (later known as The Soupy Sales Show), died on Oct. 22, 2009 at the age of 83. GAWKER has a short article on their site with a brief video. We will miss Soupy, White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie, and the rest. Thanks and a hat tip to Robert Remez.

Crumb has found god

Robert Crumb, famed illustrator and underground comix pioneer, has a new project: The Book of Genesis Illustrated, which covers the first 50 chapters of the bible. An article by David Colton in USA Today on Oct. 19, 2009, reviews the book and provides background information. In the article, Crumb reports that "It was hard to draw God."

"Should God just be a bright light? Should I use word balloons? Should God be a woman?" Crumb says the answer came to him in a dream.

"I ended up with the old stereotypical Charlton Heston kind of God, long beard, very masculine. I used a lot of white-out, a lot of corrections when I tried to draw God."

"I got totally sick of it by the end of it. I've come out exhausted," Crumb says.

"I may never draw again."

IS Group meeting: Music and Mind

The next IS Group meeting with take place at 6pm, Saturday, 17 October 2009, at the home of Douglas Whalen in Guilford, Connecticut. The theme is Music and Mind. The Readings include Oliver Sacks. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, Revised and Expanded Edition; and Daniel J. Levitin. This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession. For additional information contact Philip Rubin or Doug Whalen.

Gaia vs. Medea

This article in the always enjoyable Chronicle of Higher Education Review touches on a theme from an I.S. meeting of many years ago: James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis. An interesting twist is the recent "Medea Hypothesis", which portrays life on Earth not as a self-sustaining force restoring the planet to equlibrium, but an ultimately self-destroying force that (echoing another IS theme) pushes it away from equlibrium.

Brain Control

An article by Erico Guizzo, called "Monkeys Control Computer With Thought" in the July 2009 IEEE Spectrum online, describes the work of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. The work of Jose Carmena and his students, published in PLos Biology, shows how "a monkey’s brain is able to develop a motor memory for controlling a virtual device in a manner similar to the way it creates such a memory for the animal’s body." Lena Ting, a professor of biomedical engineering at Emory University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, in Atlanta, says that the findings may "... change the whole way that people have thought about how to approach brain-machine interfaces." "Previous research," she explains, "tried to use the parts of the brain that operate real limbs to control an artificial one. The Berkeley study suggests that an artificial arm may not need to rely on brain signals related to the natural arm; the brain can assimilate the artificial device as if it were a new part of the body."

The Smart Grid

IEEE Spectrum has a special report called The Smart Grid. "Taking the latest in computing and communications technology to make the electrical system more interactive, efficient, and robust is not a new idea. What’s new is that suddenly more than 10 billion federal dollars are being poured into it. But all that money will be well spent only if regulators are as inventive and intelligent as transmission and distribution engineers have been."

Brain hacking

WIRED, via CNN.com /technology, reports on concerns raised by Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington in a July 1, 2009 article in Neurosurgical Focus, that developments in neural engineering could pose future security risks. The article, "Neurosecurity: security and privacy for neural devices" considers what would happen if hackers focused on exploiting weaknesses in neural devices, such as the deep-brain stimulators used to treat Parkinson's and depression, or electrode systems for controlling prosthetic limbs. "It's very hard to design complex systems that don't have bugs," Kohno said. "As these medical devices start to become more and more complicated, it gets easier and easier for people to overlook a bug that could become a very serious risk. It might border on science fiction today, but so did going to the moon 50 years ago."