Obviously, things will recover. For example, life recovered from the asteriod impact 65 million years ago. Tell that to a dinosaur though. The point is, just because recovery occurs, or things adapt, does not mean it will be beneficial to us.

And that's another thing. Just how much do you know about ecosystems, trophic cascades, natural productivity, and so on? A great example is how wolves provide us with clean water. You wouldn't think, but its true.

Agreed, I am not sure why you are arguing my post on this point then.


I have an undergrad in pre-med (including a few classes on ecosystems, etc), as well as 4 years of gradschool pharmacology/neuroscience. In terms of informal education, nothing beyond wikipedia and documentaries. So... practically nothing, but probably more than the average person due to a background heavy in biology. How much do you know?

I must misunderstand you. Are you claiming Scientific American is proper scientific literature but the IPCC reports are not?

Is there a review article you recommend?

Obviously.

Hey guys, guess what! This entirely interesting and serious debate is featured here! https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/64611.msg758894#msg758894

STDP is interesting as an alternative to the methods presented by Rumelhart and McClelland in their classic PDP texts (which I studied back in the late '80s), and, in my opinion, has far more applicability to simulation of the brain than the simpler back propagation models proposed by Rumelhart.

As for wolves, I suggest you learn about the effects wolves have on riparian zones, and why it matters.

With regards to my last question. I should say that on the face of it, it appears to me the neuron has become "less certain" about which inputs to listen to, so will show a more variable response to any given input.

To sum things up, pollution is horrible and highly avoidable. Climate change can be more or less controlled by science, but the mini seasons and long seasons will be naturally hot and naturally cold, eventually freezing us all to death or burning us all up. Such is the galactic alignment we inherited. There are way better arguments for clean energy than trumped up, widely speculated claims.

If you're genuinely interested, read everything you can about the Bluebrain project: http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

They are using an IBM supercomputer which has enough resources to dedicate the equivalent of one laptop per neuron, each having perhaps 5,000 synaptic connections for the simulation of one cortical column. Watch the simulation of a cortical column completely built from scans of slices of a rat's brain: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHi9oLzvD8E

Google PDF documents where Henry Markram is a coauthor. Watch the TED video he gave. Their goal is build a complete human brain. As for some of your technical questions, I don't have the answers.

I personally was implementing STDP and an empirical model to simulate a neuron's action potential, with very efficient storage of synaptic connections, simulating the length of axons and dendrites by storing them in a list, sorted by length, such that the program could traverse the list, adding in the delay from one to the next, and thus the program would always know the next synapse which would fire, and these pulses would accumulate to each respective receiving neuron, such that it could be calculated which neuron would fire next, thus distributing pulses further on down the line.