[clug] Arlec surge protector

[Andrew Janke]

> You've nailed the 'input' side of the equation - but what about 'outputs'?

Hrm...

> I doubt I have the 'intellectual horsepower' to do your work - and most
> definitely not the aptitude.

Nah, as mentioned the general idea is that anyone can do it with
enough training. :)

> I suspect that human brains operate within a reasonably small
> power-consumption range, but their results/outputs (depth, breadth,
> speed, originality) vary wildly, hence the many attempts at "IQ" metrics.
>
> Is it at all possible to talk about "thunks" as completed tasks, not
> just describing the inputs? It might be that it's impossible.

And here is where I -- as an engineer -- will say something I very rarely say:

   "I'm going to need a psychologist" (to answer that).

Certainly this can be measured in restricted cases (IQ, aptitude, ...)
but in the general case? Intelligence is a far too nebulous and
subjective term.

Still we can have a hack at power-consumption or more specifically
brain efficiency. This is something that I am actively working on
measuring and unfortunately is not easy :(. The PET people have been
doing this for a while but the experiment is complex and involves all
sorts of big needles.

Why do this?, well some people age well and some don't. There are also
some people who have "green" brain power supplies (typically 95-100%)
and some who don't (~85%). The waste energy creates free radicals and
heat.  I'll leave the free radicals argument for another day (there is
evidence in both directions), but the heat is something I am trying to
measure in living breathing who-mans.

The current technique of choice for me is to measure local water
diffusion in the brain (via phase shift in proton density MRI) as
referenced to an external constant heat source. (tube of hot water
beside their head in the scanner).

Still enough rambling...

BUT this does involve linux! the ADC + offline reconstruction rack
based computer on said Siemens MRI scanner is linux based!  The main
XP computer runs cygwin and sends a .tar.gz over to the rack based
system on boot. I only discovered this one day by accident when
talking to a Siemens tech who walked me through restarting said rack
based system. I was quite happy to follow his instructions. :)


--
Andrew Janke
(a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883