The Gorgeous Power of Seadragon

Wait till you see Blaise Aguera y Arcas talk at TED (below) about the gorgeous power of Seadragon and Photosync.

Blaise’s talk gave me a sweeping tummy-flipping sensation.  Similar to the first time I  sailed on the open sea or faxed a picture.  Simply marvelous.   Enjoy!

Blaise and Adrienne (Fairhall) have two wonderful kids, Anselm and Eliot, who are about the same ages as Simone and Naomi.  Adrienne’s Wall is the name of their family blog.

Adrienne also has delivered masterly contributions to the world.  Both in physics and neuroscience.  She has created tools we can use to decode the language of the brain and see into what a person is experiencing.  Her elegant mathematical operations actually track a neuron’s electrical activity and may one day allow us to stimulate an experience for example, give a person the sensation of a prosthetic limb.  Wild no?

Another Adrienne discovery about how we experience is the revelation that what we see and feel  depends upon what we saw and felt previously.  She recently helped teach a visual processing medical class about this, where she showed that-the details a person would notice when looking at a painting, for  instance-depends at a fundamental, microscopic level on what their eyes were focused on previously.  The idea is rather complex, Adrienne said, because it implies that perception is always changing: “What one experiences influences how one experiences it.”  More here.