The Tattoo Used in Auschwitz Was Originally An IBM Code Number
Here is another (controversial) chapter from Russ Kick’s classic bite-size Disinformation book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know, published in 2003.
For more on Russ Kick, check out his website, The Memory Hole.
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The tattooed numbers on the forearms of people held and killed in Nazi concentration camps have become a chilling symbol of hatred. Victims were stamped with the indelible number in a dehumanizing effort to keep track of them like widgets in the supply chain.
These numbers obviously weren’t chosen at random. They were part of a coded system, with each number tracked as the unlucky person who bore it was moved through the system.
Edwin Black made headlines in 2001 when his painstakingly researched book, IBM and the Holocaust, showed that IBM machines were used to automate the “Final Solution” and the jackbooted takeover of Europe.…
Are Supercomputers Close To Replicating The Brain?
Citing competing teams on both sides of the Atlantic, this article describes “the race to develop cognitive computing by reverse engineering the brain.”
While IBM is using the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, the same supercomputer is also being used by the Blue Brain project at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne. (The head of the project notes the difficulty in “recreating the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a 2-D piece of silicon… It’s not a brain. It’s more of a computer processor that has some of the accelerated parallel computing that the brain has.”)
Meanwhile IBM still hopes “to noninvasively measure and map the connections between all cortical and sub-cortical locations within the human brain using magnetic resonance diffusion weighted imaging.”
With rapidly accelerating advances in supercomputer architectures, can a simulated human brain be far off?
CounterTech – A(F)I: Artificial (Feline) Intelligence
SittingNow.com have employed the A.I. powers of Disinformation the Podcast host Joe McFall to kick off their new and improved ‘CounterTech’ series.
This week, IBM scientists and their university partners announced a breakthrough in cognitive computing research: the simulation of a brain the size of a cat’s. Using 144 terabytes of RAM and almost 150,000 processors, scientists were able to model a neural cortex with 1 billion simulated neurons and 10 billion synaptic connections. The researchers have subsequently been awarded $16.1 million for completion of phase 0 of DARPA’s SYNAPSE project. The goal of SYNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics), according to DARPA, is “to develop electronic neuromorphic machine technology that scales to biological levels.” In layman’s terms, their goal is to put simulated brains onto microchips…
