

The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates - cwan
http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/09/efficiency.php

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Flirpon
The title is wrong. The brain isn't more efficient than previously thought.
The axonal propagation of action potentials is... but that means that the
brain burns more glucose and lactate elsewhere (at the synaptic junction, if I
understand Magistretti properly).

The other HN item (direct link to the New scientist entry) is much better.

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kurtosis
Well I can't comment on the quality of the calculations he's talking about -
but even the previous estimates of the power consumption of the brain were awe
inspiring. The power consumption and stability against things like epilepsy
are an important clue to how the thing works.

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ShardPhoenix
I wish people would stop talking about Deep Blue like it's still the state of
the art. Rybka can consistently do better than 50/50 against any human player
even running on a (reasonably modern/high-powered) commodity PC.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I assume this is the same as <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=817813>

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jacquesm
That's a tricky thing to protect against. You'd almost have to fetch all pages
and do a content comparison a la google news to see what goes together.

This sort of mixup happens all the time.

And sometimes that's even good, when an interesting subject scrolls off the
newpage before it receives any votes. Then a few days later someone will post
the same news from a different source and suddenly it makes the homepage.

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RiderOfGiraffes
I agree that's it's not necessarily avoidable, and it's not necessary to
avoid. I do think, however, that it's useful to cross-reference the items so
people can read _all_ the relevant comments.

Not everyone agrees, I occasionally get down-mud, and I'm not as anal about it
as I once was. Waba Sabi, and all that.

