feeds | grep links > Gigapixel Image of Difference Engine 2, IT for Oppression, Largest Scale Functional Brain Model to Date, and More

• Babbage Difference Engine in Gigapixel
  Cory BoingBoing linked to a post by xRez Studio about work they were contracted to do for the Computing History Museum in Mt. View, CA. In it, they explain the subject of some amazingly high resolution pictures they took, a modern completed replica of Babbage’s difference engine. The imaging is as impressive as the engine itself, sketching a breath taking arc from the earliest attempt at modern computing to one of the incredible applications made possible by its current realization.
• IT for Oppression
  Bruce Schneier has a considered post on his blog, referring to and commenting on coverage of the recent Internet outage in Syria. I don’t agree as strongly with Morozov’s conclusions as Schneier but agree his book, “The Net Delusion”, asks critical questions with which we need to engage as much as on the positive side of the adoption of multiple use technologies like computer networks, social media and cryptography. I haven’t yet read Schneier’s latest book but may move it up on my list as he apparently starts to dig into these issues in the final chapter.
• Spaun: a Large-Scale Functional Brain Model
  Slashdot was one of many to note the creation of the largest scale model of a brain to date. I think this is still incredibly limited though I am open to the suggestion of one of the researchers, that this opens the door to an interesting progression of incremental improvements and additions of functions that at some distant point may culminate in a true general reasoning machine intelligence. There is a long way to go and I think good reasons to still think this may not be possible.
• “Self-Healing” NAND Flash Memory That Can Survive Over 100 Million Cycles, Slashdot
• Movie Studios Ask Google To Censor Their Own Films, Facebook and Wikipedia, TorrentFreak
• Mozilla demos WebRTC-based Social API in Firefox, The H Open: News and Features

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