April 08, 2018 Sunday
Bedtime Story
Tonight we shall finish with the concluding
remarks of the paper ‘The Human Brain in Numbers: A Linearly Scaled-up Primate
Brain’ published in the journal Frontiers in Human neuroscience in 2009.
“Finally, if being considered the bearer of
linearly scaled-up primate brain does not sound worthy enough for the animal
that considers himself (note the author being a female has used a male
adjective) the most cognitively able on earth, one can note that there are,
indeed, two advantages to the human brain when compared to others – even if it
is not an outlier, nor unique in any remarkable way.
First, the human brain scales as a primate
brain: this economical property of scaling alone, compared to rodents, assures
that the human brain has many more neurons than would fit into a rodent brain
of similar size, and possibly into any other similarly-sized brain.
And second, out standing among primates as
the proud owner of the largest living brain assures that, at least among the
primates, we enjoy the largest number of neurons from which to derive cognition
and behavior as a whole.
It will now be interesting to determine
whether humans, indeed, have the largest number of neurons among mammals as a
whole.”
Beautiful ending to a remarkable paper, is
it not Mon ami?
I would love to go on into comparative and
evolutionary neuroscience since it is either from this field or from computer
science or both in ideal tandem that we shall finally get the answer to the
most elusive problem whose answer till date eludes us – “The origins of the
Delusion of I or the self and thereby consciousness”.
Now we shall return to the Note A of Ada
Lovelace after a significant but worthwhile digression for after all we are
already witnessing the merger of these two sciences – neuroscience and
artificial intelligence.
In this Note she starts with the Difference
Engine and then goes on to elaborate and justify how fundamentally the
Analytical Engine is different from its predecessor – essentially in its universality.
“Note A
The particular function whose integral the
Difference Engine was constructed to tabulate, is
(This is essentially a polynomial function
of seventh power which would be expressed in modern mathematical notation the
following way:
f(x) = ax7 + bx6 + cx5
+ dx4 + ex3 + gx2 + hx + i)
The purpose which that engine has been specially
intended and adapted to fulfill is the computation of astronomical and nautical
tables.
The integral of
Being
uz = a + bx + cx2 +
dx3 + ex4 + fx5 + gx6 ,
The constants a, b, c etc. are represented
on the seven columns of the discs, of which the engine consists.”
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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