🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1899@utecfa.UUCP> jaro@utecfa.UUCP (Jaro A Pristupa) writes:
>JOINT COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING SEMINAR
>
>            VLSI MODELS OF NEURO-NETWORKS
>                          by
>                Professor Carver Mead
>          California Institute of Technology
>
>                       Abstract
>
>                            ....  The thesis of this discip-
>line is that it is not possible, even in principle, to claim
>a full understanding of a system unless one is able to build
>one that functions properly.  This principle is already well
>accepted  in  molecular biology, and more recently in genet-
>ics....

	Without wishing to carp, and certainly without wanting to put anyone
	off what sounds like a Very interesting seminar (but maybe with a
	few sour grapes because I have to go to a Very uninteresting
	meeting at the same time), perhaps I could just point out that
	one of the systems we have learned to understand best in the
	twentieth century is the star.  You know, one of those bright
	things in the sky.  Very big, they are, actually, and tough to
	build.

	(You might think that an H-bomb would be a simulation.  Unfortunately
	an H-bomb is not useful even for that.  It demonstrates the basic
	mechanism of energy generation, but the scale is all wrong:  mass
	too low, temperature too high.)

	OK, I know astrophysics isn't particularly close to neurophysiology.
	But that sounded like a Grand Principle back there.  It isn't quite
	universal, but I couldn't properly go on without attending the
	seminar.

	In case you'd forgotten, here's the time of the seminar again:

>DATE:	Monday, October 6, 1986
>TIME:	4:00 p.m.
>PLACE:	GB244
>	Galbraith Building
>	University of Toronto

-- 

Jim Clarke -- Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Toronto, Canada M5S 1A4
              (416) 978-4058
{allegra,cornell,decvax,linus,utzoo}!utcsri!clarke