Posts tagged "technology"
The flight deck of the Endeavor. Yesterday, the shuttle Discovery was attached to a jumbo jet and flown to the Smithsonian in DC. Thousands of people lined the Potomac to see it, talking all proud pig about the United States’ science and technology. Don’t they realize that it is going to a museum and that we have no capabilities for manned space flight anymore? Oh, the irony….
I am embarrassed.
Sewing machine
Although we have the illusion of receiving high-resolution images from our eyes, what the optic nerve actually sends to the brain is just outlines and clues about points of interest in our visual field. We then essentially hallucinate the world from cortical memories that interpret a series of extremely low-resolution movies that arrive in parallel channels.
Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near, referencing Roska and Werblin’s article in Nature ‘Vertical Interactions Across Ten Parallel, Stacked Representations in the Mammalian Retina’ (March 29, 2001)
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps only weigh one and a half tons.
Popular Mechanics, March 1949
