Here we go again
I was looking through the census info because I'm a dork, and I came across the metro area populations for America. I was surprised to find that Portland, at #23 is 2.26 million people...I'd kind of thought it was 1.5 million. Shows what I know. Seattle is 3.55 million and San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose is 7.04 million. What d'ya know. Also interesting was that Portland-proper is the 28th largest city 529,121 people only a couple places behind Seattle at 563,374. San Francisco has 776,733 people. All available here.
In politics, the NYT has a pair of articles on the aftermath of the election as concernsthe political parties. One is about the effect on the Democrats and one on the Republicans. My guess is that the Republican party is going to become more evangelical and religiously conservative no matter which way the election swings. On the fiscal side, I don't know where it will go. The Democrats I suspect will become more moderate as Democratic Senators and House members enter from Southern states. But nationwide? Again, I don't know. I'll repeat again, I think the Democrats need a better (or a singular) unifying intellectual philosophy. What do the Democrats stand for? I can certainly answer that, but not in any real consistent way; I feel like the Democratic platform is a mish-mash of ideas without any real consistency.
Now on to the really cool stuff. Some scientists have taken neurons from a rat brain, cultured them, and taught them to fly a simple flight simulator - the first step towards a living artificial brain. There's the press release and general info, and then the Wired article. I think this is very exciting and would love to do something like this after University. I've heard that for Computational Neurobiology grad programs they prefer people with strong math backgrounds than strong biology backgrounds, because it is easier to teach math people biology (it's really just a bunch of memorization, from what I can tell) than it is to teach biology people math (guess what I think about that ;). I still find the idea of an artificially-grown brain a little creepy, but very cool. Who needs ethics in science?
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home