According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That’s the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain’s low energy requirements of just 20 watts–barely enough to run a dim light bulb….

[The new idea] trades the extreme precision of digital transistors for the brain’s chaos of many neurons firing, with misfires 30 percent to 90 percent of the time. Yet the brain works with this messy system by relying on crowds of neurons to shout over the noise of misfires and competing signals.

That willingness to give up precision for chaos could lead to a new era of creative computing that simulates the unpredictable patterns of brain activity. It could also represent a far more energy-efficient era — the Neurogrid fits in a briefcase and runs on what amounts to a few D batteries, or less than a watt. Rather than transistors, it uses capacitors that get the same voltage of neurons.

Let me be the first to welcome our new neurogrid overlords.

(For a fuller writeup on this, see this discovery article.)

The cooing of pigeons brought memory into the procession. Dessie remembered how her father had said, sitting at the head of the table, “I told Rabbit I was going to raise some pigeons and—do you know?—he said, ‘No white pigeons.’ ‘Why not white?’ I asked him, and he said, ‘They’re the rare worst of bad luck. You take a flight of white pigeons and they’ll bring sadness and death. Get gray ones.’ ‘I like white ones.’ ‘Get gray ones,’ he told me. And as the sky covers me, I’ll get white ones.”

And [his wife] Liza said patiently, “Why do you be forever testing, Samuel? Gray ones taste just as good and they’re bigger.”

“I’ll let no flimsy fairy tale push me,” Samuel said.

And Liza said with her dreadful simplicity, “You’re already pushed by your own contentiousness. You’re a mule of contention, a very mule!”

“Someone’s got to do these things,” he said sullenly. “Else Fate would not ever get nose-thumbed and mankind would still be clinging to the top branches of a tree.”

And of course he got white pigeons and waited truculently for sadness and death until he’d proved his point.

And yet, as Dessie realizes, “Sadness and death… you just have to wait around long enough and it will come” — white pigeons or gray ones.

Okay, maybe it’s not really R — quick, flee, there’s a drunken man in the house!

(via)

If a couple has been married for more than five years, any persistent disharmony in their marriage relationship is usually attributable to the husband’s lack of understanding and applying genuine love. (Gary Smalley, If He Only Knew, 73)

It seems that stems from the perspective that the husband is the “leader.” In fact, Smalley acknowledges that the husband is biblically “responsible for the disharmony in [their] home.”

Do you agree or disagree that it’s usually the husband’s fault when there’s persistent disharmony after 5 years?

Awkward:

A priest in the Diocese of Scranton has been removed as administrator of three Throop parishes after he inadvertently displayed four photos of what a diocese spokesman called “minimally attired adult males” before the 8 a.m. Mass at St. Bridget’s Church on Oct. 25.

The Rev. Edward P. Lyman was using his personal computer to project an informational DVD about the diocesan Annual Appeal fundraiser when he accidentally showed the “inappropriate personal photographs” that were stored on his computer, according to a diocesan statement read at the Throop Masses on Sunday.

Well, that’s one way to wake up your congregation. I’m picturing all the white-haired women from the last Catholic Church I attended. “Hail Mother Mary, full of grace, the Lord is … HELLO!”

On the plus side:

Diocese spokesman William Genello said the photos were not pornographic and did not display nudity or sexual activity. The photos were not of the Rev. Lyman, nor did he take the pictures, Mr. Genello said.

There were no pictures of minors and no evidence of illegal activity, he said.

So provided there were no heart attacks at the sudden display of masculine cheesecake, no one was harmed in the process of this massive screw-up. It appears that Rev. Lyman is off to receive “appropriate care for whatever has led to such behavior on his part,” which sounds a little ominous. This is one time where I don’t think the priest did anything wrong, other than pressing the wrong button.

I’m sure the Catholic Church would award a no-prize to anyone who could suggest a graceful way for a priest to recover from this situation.

(via)

Jim Stevens says he’s not particularly religious and is clueless about why an image resembling Jesus Christ keeps appearing on his pickup.

Stevens — of Jonesborough — says nearly every morning, an image that looks to him like the face of Jesus Christ has appeared in the condensation on the driver’s side window of his Isuzu truck.

A Johnson City Press photo of the truck showed a facial image.

Stevens said when he first saw the image, he figured it would evaporate and not return. But it kept reappearing for two weeks now.

Stevens said folks at the grocery store he goes to were amazed to see the image.

He says he isn’t going to wash the truck for a while.

I’ll give this guy credit though — at least he just says “I don’t know” and isn’t worshiping it. That’s some progress!

(I’m obviously kidding that I had anything to do with the sticker, but that’s my initial guess based on the detail of the image and when it appears.)

Update: It’s even simpler than I first said — who needs rain-x when you have sticker residue? So I removed the rain-x complication.

A similar committee: Microsoft in 1978

We finally have discovered, beyond any shadow of a doubt, how our universe was been created. No, it’s wasn’t by some all-powerful eternally begotten long-haired hippy. Nor was it from an Invisible Pink Unicorn (bless his holy hooves). It ends up the universe was created by committee.

Doesn’t everything make so much more sense now?

The most extensive analysis yet undertaken of the structure and contents of the universe conclusively proves the universe was created not by a single entity, as has been widely suggested, but by “a fractious and disorganized committee or committees given to groupthink and petty infighting”, according to Drs. Karl Pootle and Yumble Frick, co-authors of the study. The analysis is expected to have profound implications on the theoretical underpinnings of many popular religions….

“Biodiversity is the primary stumbling block,” said Dr. Pootle. “Whoever created this cacophony of species would have had to be infinitely powerful and infinitely creative, but also infinitely schizophrenic to come up with the myriad different solutions to identical problems that the creators of the universe have. Either that, or we’re looking at a different kind of process altogether”….

“If you’re one guy designing a universe, why come up with twenty different ways of tackling the same issue?” Pootle said. “If you’re omnipotent, presumably you know perfectly well whatever the one solution is that will work best, and you go with that. The fact that the world obviously doesn’t work that way is what led us first to the committee theory. The plants and animals that inhabit the Earth show the kinds of random and incoherent thinking that can only otherwise be found in the products of design committees where there’s a lot of CYA and turf protection going on.”

Here’s a little ditty I learned back in the days of Vacation Bible School:

The Lord is good to me,
And so I thank the Lord,
For giving me
the things I need,
The sun and rain and an apple seed.
The Lord is good to me.

I suspect that many of you are baffled, particularly those of you from outside the US. This is supposedly the prayer of Johnny Appleseed, an early American missionary who traveled the frontier, planting small patches of apple trees along the way.

The song was featured in a short Disney film that was inflicted on boys of my generation. It depicted Johnny as a simple man, his only possessions a bible, a pouch of apple seeds and a tin pot which he carried on his head. Since it’s a Disney cartoon, Johnny pauses to cavort with the woodland creatures at every opportunity.

The Swedenborg Collective

Pullquote: I have often talked with angels on this subject, and they have invariably declared that in heaven they are unable to divide the Divine into three, because they know and perceive that the Divine is One and this One is in the Lord.
Emanuel Swedenborg

This is one of those cases where the reality is more complicated than Disney could handle. The man who inspired the legend was named John Chapman, a curator of apple nurseries in Ohio in the early 19th century. He was indeed a traveling evangelist, but not the sort that Disney imagines. Chapman was a actually a traveling Swedenborgian.

The Swedenborgian Church is an offshoot of Christianity, based on the writings of an 18th century Swedish visionary named Emanuel Swedenborg. Like many religious visionaries, Swedenborg believed that Christianity had been obscured by centuries of misunderstanding, and that he was receiving revelations of the pure religion directly from God. His new religion was mystical and difficult to grasp, but he clearly rejected the doctrine of the Trinity. He also rejected the simplistic interpretation of Sola Fide (faith alone), and insisted that faith is only a guide to the true path to salvation, which included works of charity.

The Swedenborgian “New Church” became moderately popular in England, then spread to the US in the early 19th century. In America, which they called the “New Jerusalem,” Swedenborg’s writings were influential if not exactly popular. It’s hard to say how many members the church had, but it did directly influence the Transcendentalists. Swedenborg’s concept of a three-tiered heaven may have influenced Joseph Smith’s emerging Church of Latter Days Saints.

Johnny Appleseed’s Religion

Pullquote: “This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries.”

John Chapman was a star player, from the early days of the American church until his death in 1845. Consider this extract from a meeting of the English branch of the New Church, shortly after the American branch was founded:

There is in the western country a very extraordinary missionary of the New Jerusalem. A man has appeared who seems to be almost independent of corporeal wants and sufferings. He goes barefooted, can sleep anywhere, in a house or out of a house, and live upon the coarsest and most scanty of fare. He has actually thawed ice with his bare feet. He procures what books he can of the New Church Swedenborg, travels into the remote settlements, and lends them wherever he can find readers [...] This man for years past has been in the employment of bringing into cultivation, in numberless places in the wilderness, small patches (two or three acres) of ground, and then sowing apple seeds and rearing nurseries. (quoted in Occult America, 39-41)

No word on whether or not he danced with raccoons.

Some years back, the historian Mike Wallace coined the term “Mickey Mouse History” to describe the sanitized, streamlined history that frequently gets produced in America. This is the sort of commemorative history that is informed more by nostalgia or ideology than historical principles. The Disney image of Johnny Appleseed is a perfect example of this, but the problem goes deeper.

The period where Chapman was active is known as the Second Great Awakening. It’s usually depicted as the triumph of Evangelical Christianity as it spread through the land, driven by tent revivals and itinerant preachers. Stories like Chapman’s remind us that the reality was far more complex than that. Religion in America has always been heterodox and complicated, from the founding to today.

On Sunday, November 1st, plainclothes and uniformed police who had been called in earlier by officials of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago (EHSC) dragged out, maced and arrested a man for videotaping Sunsara Taylor as she stood near her seat and made a statement before the start of that morning’s program about the shameful cancellation of her long planned talk to EHSC that day on the topic “Morality without Gods.”

The shocking incident took place at the insistence of the president of EHSC. About 40 people witnessed the videographer being brutalized by the police in the foyer of the facility. An attorney demanded that the police stop brutalizing him when five officers piled on him as he lay face down on the floor. 6 police cars arrived within minutes.

The day before, during a workshop on the same premises which the president and other board members of the EHS were at, Sunsara explained very clearly that she would be attending the opening of the EHS’s Sunday gathering and giving the EHS the opportunity to do the right thing and allow her talk to go forward, up until the last minute. If the EHS still refused to let her give her talk, she explained that she would leave and give her talk in “exile” at the nearby home of one of the EHS members.

This is being discussed over at Pharyngula and Friendly Atheist already, but this story is so weird that I think it deserves continued publicity.

It doesn’t seem like anyone knows the reason why the police arrested this man. What a mess.

Update: There is another version of events in the comments. Hopefully there will be something official put up soon.

Glad I didn’t grow up in that home.

New York state politics is famously corrupt. For a variety of reasons, Albany remains one of the last bastions of machine politics. This can make arguments very partisan, and now a county executive out in Buffalo has stepped up to show just how easily “partisan” can make the jump to “insane.”

From the The Buffalo News:

… county executive [Chris Collins] referred to French seer Nostradamus’ prediction that the world would experience three Antichrists in conjunction with the Apocalypse, whose origin is the New Testament’s Book of Revelation.

Collins then said it’s generally accepted that the first was Napoleon, the second Hitler, and that he was “pretty sure” the third is [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver, an orthodox Jew from Manhattan.

Frankly, it’s the reference to Nostradamus that pins the meter for me. Bad enough to bring up the anti-christ, but dragging the 16th century occult visionary into the mix pushes things into the “wacky” category.

To be fair, Collins has apologized and tried to explain his little joke:

The county executive said this in the context of Silver as part of Albany’s “three men in a room” budget process, in which the Assembly speaker, the State Senate majority leader and the governor make most budgetary decisions.

The “three men in a room” situation is real enough, which is a product of the machine politics I mentioned above. But to go from “three men in a room” to “three anti-christs” seems to imply that the other two men in the room represent the previous anti-christs. Comparing our hapless Governor Patterson to either Napoleon or Hitler is not so much insulting as laughable.

Screw it, I’m just going to assume that Collins just didn’t think about his joke before he let it slip. But the fact that this joke seemed like a good idea, even at first glance, either shows how partisan things are, or how loony Collins is.