The One With The Brain In The Can

So, crikey, things have been happening. Nick's back! My camera is back from being fixed! Not only that but I've just written a new show for a stand-up gig on Friday, CHDK has now been written by the forumHeroes over at chdk.wikia.com for my little Ixus, and my woodlice have just had a litter of woodlicelings. Whoo! Life is good.

So, that's why I haven't been writing. But on top of that I haven't been getting much sleep recently. There have been other things happening instead of sleep. What? No! Seriously, there is been caek! In small quantities. And what else? Tidying. And thinking.

But there has been one tiny dream that had such an interesting thing happen that I had to remember it.

This was going to work. It had to. Not "It has to work!" like, as in desperate, just the maths and physics behind it means that it has to work. Like when you drop a ball, it has to fall. It just has to. So yeah, this was going to work. I could tell.

I took the saucepan off the heat, grabbed the carefully cleaned bean tin from the counter top and headed into the garden. The bean tin was my choice, the process just needed a container, I figured a metal can to increase the cooling effect of the environment on the broth that I was now pouring in from the pan. The quicker it cooled, the faster it would set. The faster things set, the smaller the contiguous tessellating unit size. And the smaller the tessellating unit size, the more you could fit in the can. Power, it was all about power.

I placed the pan aside and dug a small pit in the cool earth and placed the tin into it, refilling the loose areas to increase soil to can contact. Good! It was starting to set already. Extra geletine during heating had been a good plan, methinks. Not enough to interfere with axonal growth, just enought to ensure that the liquid/solid boundary moved at the same speed as the synapse front. That was the plan. Only the centrw of the cylinder was now liquid, so I pulled the usb cable out of my pocket and pushed the male end into the gel.

I noticed something new as the synapse front met in the centre of the cylinder, locking the usb cable into position. A gentle blue glow coming from the waxy translucent set material. Ha, just like in Star Trek! I remember that the BioNeural gel packs that comprised the computers of one of thoces ships gave off a blue glow.



Well, let's see if this is as fast as it should be. I heaved a paving slab over the top of the tin to keep the new computer out of the sun and trailed the usb cable back through the kitchen and the lounge to my room and plugged it into the back of my computer. Now we find out if this thing is as clever as it should be. Based on my calculations, this new neural computer should be able to use pure logic to supliment our slow internet connection with what it had worked out should be what would be on that page if it had loaded yet. Think fairy-cake powered Total Perspective Vortex machine. See? Cunning.

I opened wikipedia and started a search. The pictures were slow to load due to our internec connection, but without a hesitation the brain in the can guessed what they would be. I loved this new brain in a can.