Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Module 2

While reading an article about brain-computer interfaces, I came across a startling sentence. The author of the article states: Many believe that humans and computers will be integrated as one, and certainly the technology is almost there." How scary is that? Reminds me a bit of Michael Crichton's novel "Sphere".. and that didn't go so well.

Along the lines of humans and computers becoming one, I will say, it seems that, even as we are currently two separate entities, our human world is completely dependent on these machines. Just this week at the library where I work our network was upgraded. During the upgrade there was network downtime. Therefore, work was completely halted, for an entire afternoon. We might as well have been sent home. My co-workers and I just sat around reminiscing about, the good old days, before these machines took over our lives.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Module 1

The most shocking part of our readings, to me, was the idea of DNA computers. I really can't comprehend how that would work, even after reading about it, and reading a little more about it. Not that there weren't other parts of the reading that were difficult to comprehend (all that math, yeesh!). But at least I had heard of all the other concepts mentioned, like the hardware parts, even if I severely needed clarification. The DNA though, is just way out there. Kind of frightening, actually.