[extropy-chat] T-shirts? Intro post

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Neil Halelamien <neuronexmachina at gmail.com> wrote:
> To switch to a topic completely different from
> what's been discussed
> recently: Are there by chance any t-shirts available
> (clever or
> otherwise) which have messages/images related to
> extropy,
> transhumanism, or the singularity? It probably
> sounds tacky, but I've
> found t-shirts to be an effective means of planting
> memes in people's
> heads and initiating dialogue.

Tacky can be good.  If you can reduce it to a
commonplace thing, and your objective in the first
place was to make it commonplace...

> This is my first post here, so I should probably
> introduce myself. I'm
> Neil, a first-year graduate student at Caltech,
> pursuing a PhD in
> Computation & Neural Systems. My past research
> experience is with
> computational neuroscience and robot vision, when I
> was studying
> computer science and cognitive science at Carnegie
> Mellon. I'm still
> uncertain as to what area my thesis will be on, but
> I'm interested in
> such topics as computational vision, the neural
> basis of
> consciousness, modeling of the visual system, and
> neuroprosthetics.
> I've been interested in extropy for a couple of
> years now, and also
> have a keen interest in commercial spaceflight and
> space settlement.

Hmm.  Well, I can invite you over to
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/howtobuildaspacehabitat/
for the latter.  As to the former...have you heard
much about the work being done on neural net modelling
of human vision, including higher-level processes like
object recognition, and if so could you give a digest
of the current state of the art?  This would seem to
be one of the things likely to lead towards computer
modelling of the entire human brain, not to mention
its more immediate applications.