Alice/Algebra in Wonderland

Have to read the book again, with these perpective in mind...

clipped from www.nytimes.com Alice’s adventures have often been assumed to be based purely on wild imagination Yet Dodgson most likely had real models for the strange happenings Alice has slid down from a world governed by the logic of universal arithmetic to one where her size can vary from nine feet to three inches “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.” No, it isn’t, replies the Caterpillar, who comes from the mad world of symbolic algebra “Keep your temper.” In Dodgson’s day, intellectuals still understood “temper” to mean the proportions in which qualities were mixed so the Caterpillar is telling Alice not to avoid getting angry but to stay in proportion clipped from www.nytimes.com “A Mad Tea-Party,” we should read tea-party as t-party, with t being the mathematical symbol for time At the mad tea party, time is the absent fourth presence at the table How do we know for sure that “Alice” was making fun of the new math? Dodgson rarely wrote amusing nonsense Math gave “Alice” a darker side

Attempts to Restore Vision

Researchers worldwide are trying to find ways to use electronics to improve visual recognition.

clipped from www.wired.com Bionic Vision Australia, has developed a device called the wide-view neurostimulator Bionic Vision Australia uses an external camera An electrode array is implanted in the eye and that connects to the central part of the retina where the greatest number of retinal neurons are present An external unit has vision-processing software to help generate the electrical impulses. The resultant vision is not the same as the images that a sighted person sees it’s a pixelated version with a relatively small number of dots: about 100 in early versions team hope to do the first human implant in 2013 groups in Germany and Japan are working on similar projects clipped from www.wired.com MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain It won’t entirely restore normal vision, say the researchers, but it will offer just enough sight to help a blind person navigate a room The eyeball holds a microchip encased in a sealed titanium case clipped from review.ucsc.edu Wentai Liu clipped from www.wired.com The Dobelle artificial vision system