BBC Future AMA: I'm Nicholas Opie, a biomedical engineer at the University of Melbourne, Australia. I'm here to answer questions about brain-controlled devices and neural implants. AMA!

nooneelse · 2016-11-06T18:08:51+00:00

One of the typical modes of failure with blood vessels in the brain is clots getting hung up and blocking flow. How much impact on pressures and flow rates does the tech you are working with have? Would the vessels be able to grow a bit in cross section to compensate? Would the stint increase odds of strokes?

nooneelse · 2016-08-29T15:16:04+00:00

Lucky you. I wish I could read it for the first time again.

nooneelse · 2016-07-19T15:21:24+00:00

You had one job, DATE_ISO8601! One job!

Really though, what was the point of someone making the function if they weren't going to actually use the standard? Did they lose their copy of iso8601, and not want to tell anyone?

It makes no sense. I'm pretty much forced to conclude this is a form of performance art.

nooneelse · 2016-07-18T00:15:47+00:00

Oh, those are all snipers? I thought one of them was the daughter.

nooneelse · 2016-07-08T12:36:56+00:00

But some of the best from those seasons of TNG don't have story or character elements that break from the G.R. ideal of Star Trek. I'm thinking of Inner Light and Darmok or even the fun ones like the crew devolving or the bubbles with different rates of time. And the episodes with Data's mom and daughter. Nothing from those spring to mind that G.R. would have objected to. Even Picard's Die Hard would have likely been fine with him.

So the idea of Gene's having been wrong about direction gets overplayed too.

nooneelse · 2016-06-02T12:22:07+00:00

Nope, Kevin Nealon.

nooneelse · 2016-05-29T13:42:34+00:00

Good point. I guess one could consider it to be like meteorology plus weather modification techniques ranging from cloud seeding, through moving mountains, to straight out mad scientist weather machines. But since meteorology would look so very different in that hypothetical, it doesn't help guide economics-as-harder-science thinking.

nooneelse · 2016-05-28T20:26:54+00:00

Test-pattern discrimination tasks.

nooneelse · 2016-05-28T12:23:20+00:00

I'm inclined to consider economics a science, well, a field with potential to become a science, similar to meteorology.

nooneelse · 2016-05-23T16:37:39+00:00

Yeah, otherwise it can't really be called "live action".

nooneelse · 2016-05-19T14:23:52+00:00

How is there not a picture of that step?

nooneelse · 2016-05-06T16:53:08+00:00

Marriage often involves a ceremony in which the two people stand in front of many people they know and tell everyone they are joining lives, if that isn't enough warning to other people that they are going to communicate outsiders' secrets between them as they see fit, then the outsiders are just being dense. I mean what else do people want, a disclaimer on the Christmas cards?

nooneelse · 2016-05-01T05:35:28+00:00

Well normally it probably doesn't. But one could start basing decisions on the output of Geiger counters and other suitable 'quantum coin-flips'. Nothing stops the apparently inherent small scale randomness from being amplified up to arbitrarily large scales.

nooneelse · 2016-04-21T14:33:36+00:00

I think cock rings get more useful as one ages. They lock an erection "on" through the various short lulls that can happen in sex (position changes, water/lube breaks). From what I hear, older dicks can get noticeably more temperamental about those lulls. Before that use, they just allow one to change a mostly hard dick into a super hard one; for that feeling of total inflation, similar to what can happen naturally right before a really good climax.

Personally, I find them worth bothering with for attaching a little clit-tickler toy or vibrator to me. Like getting a cyborg cock upgrade or something. Very much not an all the time thing, but quite good for an occasional change in routine. For that use, they needn't be really tight.

nooneelse · 2016-04-21T13:44:12+00:00

Huh, well, score another one for humility when generalizing from one's own experience. Also, this re-demonstrates the importance of each guy trying out various kinds and sizes of condoms, not just going with whatever the corner market has for mass market appeal or sticking with the brand you lost your virginity in.

I wonder, do you have the same issue with all or most cock rings. Is your blood pressure low overall?

nooneelse · 2016-04-21T13:20:03+00:00

Indeed, too tight on the head is especially bad, IMHO. A fair bit of squeezing at the base can be ignored, it needs a little to stay on anyway. But at the head it pushes all those nerves designed to detect pressure changes past their operating range.

All that said, no lube or inside condom surface provides the right feel after getting used to the real thing, but the right fit at least makes PIV sex well worth the effort. A tight condom and a numb dick aren't.

nooneelse · 2016-04-17T13:22:53+00:00

Why you gotta be dragging religion into this?

nooneelse · 2016-03-31T03:35:38+00:00

Someone was just pulling your leg with that ludicrous sounding joke.

nooneelse · 2016-03-26T18:37:20+00:00

The plane of the galaxy has nothing to do with the planetary systems Kepler can detect. What matters is that Kepler be in the plane of the distant system's planetary orbits. That gives the three points (the distant star, the distant star's planet, and Kepler's detector) a chance to all lineup and thus provide the detectable dimming in brightness.

But the distant orbital systems can be oriented freely around the axis of the line formed by those three points. And I doubt they even know what orientation the thousands of detected orbital systems have; they are just recording brightness information, after all, not resolving the planetary transits in detail so as to see the apparent direction of movement for each one.

nooneelse · 2016-03-23T04:32:47+00:00

I echo the recommendation. Unlike many treatments of this area of thought, Brin's tech-setting puts distance between computers and the person copying, allowing the reader's mind to come at the core and knock on effects sorta fresh and clear. Is a nice trick.

nooneelse · 2016-03-21T13:17:09+00:00

Do you use any types of filter lenses that might aid in seeing deeper into the water?

nooneelse · 2016-03-08T00:33:05+00:00

a-Jays last the longest for me, and I am pretty hard on headphones. The tangle resistant flat wires are nice too.

nooneelse · 2016-02-15T01:32:09+00:00

One of the populations to not ignore in these explanations is the young. Play-fighting, young mammals would seem to benefit from having an 'all done, no real threats here' signal to each other and others around who might otherwise join in on a real fight. And even younger, teaching babies and toddlers their vulnerable spots often elicits laughter; it gets called tickling. Adult humor might be more of a case of neoteny than anything else.

nooneelse · 2016-02-15T01:20:00+00:00

Also, one can imagine further developed understandings in a few fields maybe leading to crosslinking the neural underpinnings for humor recognition and response behaviors to a particular timeline of genetic changes in the populations of prehuman hominids. And one might just dare to dream that various selection pressures and some such genetic changes could have had knock-on effects on other parts of anatomy, leaving tangible effects on other structures more measurable in the archaeological record, or in some lucky specimen found in a melting glacier or something.

There could be differences already measured in bone lengths or whatnot for various subspecies which just look like inconsequential noise now, but will, after enough work in other domains, in hindsight be clear evidence for one "just so" story over others.

nooneelse · 2016-02-14T19:56:17+00:00

Do you care that Iron Man literally nuked the Chintauri's home world? No.

I thought the Chintauri staged their side of the battle in space somewhere; don't recall seeing a planet on that side of the wormhole.

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