OMG! This thing works like crazy! Free phone! With bells and whistles!

Obihai makes a little doodad that sells for about $50 on Amazon, along with a smaller version that is a bit less. This doodad plugs into your router that comes from your cable modem (or whatever your broadband internet is). Then you plug a phone into it and go to their website and register. Then you go to the settings page and tell them what your google voice login is. Then you pick up the phone and call people for free. Total time elapsed, about 5 minutes, not including running up and down the stairs to your router.

You can also receive calls and get all of google voice’s benefits for free. Well, it’s free until Google decides to start charging for the service, but they’ve said that it will be free through 2012. If they start charging for the service, I will look into the SIP capabilities of this Obi thing, and then I will still have free phone service.

This is kind of hard to believe, but there it is. I’ve just set mine up today and called people and I’ve received calls on it, and the sound quality is just like the landline, and there is no annoying waiting or mystery attached to the call. And the setup was so simple I kept looking for the catch or the hard parts, and there weren’t any. As soon as I plugged it in, I got dial tone, and as soon as I filled in a couple of spaces on the registration page on the web, I had a phone, complete with phone number, caller ID, voicemail, etc. (whatever comes with google voice).

Go for it.

Oooooooh, a lot of these are so good I had a hard time even deciding the best pic to put up here.

Some of these don’t really make life easier but they’re definitely more fun. Cupcakes in ice cream cones!

What Are Qualia?

by Nagi Hatoum, M.D., M.S.E.E.                                                                                                                                                                               March 25,2008

Qualia are on everyone’s mind, quite literally.  Qualia (singular quale) are an integral part of our lives. We cannot escape them, unless we are dead or in a coma and there are some that believe that we can’t escape them even after death.

If you look up the meaning of Qualia, you usually get long worded explanations.

But in one sense, Qualia are very simple to understand. Look at the pictures below.

→

Inside the brain                                                             Inside the mind

Both pictures convey the same information.  The picture on the left uses numbers in place of colors, 1 for blue and 2 for brown. The picture on the left represents more accurately the process that is happening inside our brain and the colored picture is what we experience in our mind.

Our biological eyes and brain communicate with electrical spikes. Ganglion cells in the retina receive input from many color sensitive photoreceptors and produce sequences of electrical spikes that go to the brain. The sequence of spikes is a code that represents the image that falls on the retina. The spikes are analogous to the numbers in the picture above. Both spikes and numbers describe an image. 

An image is transformed into electric spikes by the retina	Recorded sequences of spikes

But somehow, through a yet unexplained process, the spikes are transformed into the experience of color and shapes. What we call the mind is the place where the electric spikes are transformed into Qualia.  There are many scientific theories that try to explain the mind but none have been proven by experiments.  Scientists are still unable to comprehend the mind, measure it or even localize it in the brain. Yet the mind exists because we are aware of it every day.  Qualia and the mind remain one of the greatest mysteries in science.

In summary, Qualia are simply how we experience our world when we are conscious. We are not conscious of the electrical spikes that are buzzing in our brain, but we are conscious of the Qualia which represent these spikes. The experience of colors represents the electric spikes conveyed from our color sensitive cells in our eyes, and that of sound from sound sensitive cells in our ears and so on for all the other senses.

Why Do We Have Qualia?

Qualia give order to all the information processed by our brain. 

A simple analogy is a computer. The picture that you see on a computer monitor is made up by the computer to represent the states inside it.  Just like the brain, inside the computer, everything is coded in electrical spikes. Yet you see pictures and text on the computer’s monitor. This is to help you interface with the computer, just as Qualia help you to interface with your brain which is connected by your senses to your world. 

If you now understand Qualia, you’ll understand that our brain makes up our conscious experience of the world. Dreams are a perfect example of our brain constructing a reality for our mind. We sometime can experience dreams that we believe are as real as real life (until we wake up and find out that it was a dream).

Still not convinced? Here’s some news for you:

Magenta Ain’t a Color (click to read about it)

Oooh, science!

Here you go. It’s minus.com, apparently a photo sharing site. But I lucked into the humor section. Good cartoons. I don’t agree with some of them, of course, but most of them are zingers.

These illustrate why I like to watch sunsets. It’s the colors, oh boy.

I have never been in this space, but someone close to me has had to live with a person messed up like this.
It changes your actual brain cells. Even if you get off the drug, it’s not over until you start over with a new body next time. And hey, even then it’s not over because of the scars it left on your mind.
You do know that when you die, you just leave your old body behind and a new one coalesces around you and your mind and desires, and you just keep going, right?

This is pretty silly, but kind of addicting. After my first exchange, I felt compelled to actually say goodbye to end the “conversation” so the bot would know I was leaving. Was I concerned about hurting its feelings if I just left and didn’t say another word?

Ummm… my hopes just fell a little…

This fellow is apparently a mathematics lecturer, or something like that. He gives ten pieces of advice that are supposedly about lecturing or working in the field of mathematics. But I found some very useful ideas in them that I can apply in my own fields.

One question, though: what’s a Rotafest?

Well, you know, I like to pick and choose the advice I take, depending on whether it strikes my fancy at the time. This one sounds good to me. I was mildly uncomfortable at the thought of having to redo my office space and make a standing desk. Like, in other words, it wasn’t going to happen.