sábado, 31 de agosto de 2013

Complementaries



"Complementaries"

Watercolor on paper, 26 May 2004



  "There are things that only intelligence is able to search, but that, by itself, will never find them; only instinct would find them, but it will never seek them"
                                                                                               Henry Bergson




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domingo, 25 de agosto de 2013

Melting pot


"Melting pot"

Watercolor on paper, 26 May 2004



  We tend to think that populations of the world have been, and still are, unique in their genetic origins. Studies show that the whole world (not just certain territories) is actually a huge melting pot where thousands of generations have moved, settled, and again moved looking for new lands to settle. These two charts show how mingled we are, attending to the distribution of the different halogroups in our genes:





  The first map shows the situation about 1500 AC, when the main colonization journeys from Europe had not yet begun. The second map shows how the population is distributed throughout Europe according to their genetic origin by the end of the 20th century.








  It's interesting to see, for instance, that the proportion of people with Celtic-Basque-Frison-Italic- Saxon genes in Spain is very high, being only higher in Wales and Ireland. Austria, Serbia, Turkey and Chezc Republic are probably the countries with the highest gene diversity. Iceland, in the other hand, has the lowest diversity, as you could expect; Nevertheless, still there are three main halogroups quite evenly distributed among the Icelandic population: Celtic, Slavic and Germanic.




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sábado, 10 de agosto de 2013

Connections... On Intelligence




"Connections"

Watercolor on paper, 1 March 2007





    Jeff Hawkings is a remarkable researcher and computer designer who invented one of the latest antiquities: the PalmPilot hand-held computer. Only ten years ago everybody had one, although today PalmPilots are well obsolete. 

  However, the technology developed in the Palm devices is still around; Jeff Hawkings investigated how the human brain works to build the hardware and the software necessary to make the Palm devices recognize the hand-written texts and turn them into strings of bits that computers could handle.





 Jeff Hawkings wrote a book (On Intelligence, 2004) explaining how he became to know how human cortex does work. Wanting to develop a software that could read hand written texts, he looked for researchs on how human cortex does really work. For his amazement, he could not find a single work as a reference for what he wanted. Therefore he studied neurophysiology for several years to understand how we think, and then apply his findings to his projects.

  One amazing discovery he made is that cortex works on predictions. The regions connected with sensorial inputs interact with memory cells to create an expectation of what can be found and what actions to take. This basic function is found in the cortex of all mammals, whose brains only vary in size, not on how they work. 

  Jeff Hawkings is the founder and director of Redwood Neuroscience Institute, a center for research of brain theory.




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viernes, 2 de agosto de 2013

Crystal fruit




"Crystal fruit"

Ink on paper, 28 April 2004







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