Louise East writes romantically, in diary format, about how she fell in love with Berlin at first sight:

September 15th

Berlin Schönefeld Airport

Six weeks ago, with another London winter looming and my lease running out, I decided I needed a change. Within days, I had arranged a sublet on a cheap apartment in Berlin and found a friend gracious enough to give my boxes basement space.

It happened so fast that it’s only as I stand outside Arrivals, waiting for the shuttle bus, that I start to wonder what the hell I’m doing in Berlin, a city I’ve never set foot in before.

I have not spoken German since my Leaving Cert oral several light years ago, and as far as company goes, I will be reliant on a handful of friends of friends who live here.

So why Berlin? Probably because I’ve never been there. In the absence of anything as dull as facts, my imagination has cooked up a Berlin of the mind, a timeless city where David Bowie is still in the Hansa studios recording Heroes , Sally Bowles is running a kohl pencil under one eye, and across town, chisels are slowly pecking holes in a 12-foot concrete wall.

In this metropolis I have created, I can see myself striding down Unter den Linden in dark weather. I am wearing a trilby and possibly an eye patch and when snow starts to peel off the sky, I duck into a mahogany-lined coffee house, sip on a Pilsner and write pithy notes about the 20th century in a series of black leather notebooks.

Why Berlin, indeed.

An enjoyable read. Full Article: Irish Times

Albeit the brain of a cat.

The US defence agency DARPA is putting 4.9m dollars into it, but there are apparently no specific plans for the technology that they are trying to develop along with IBM — a computer brain, reverse engineered by neurobiologists, psychologists, computer and materials scientests.

The fundamental shift toward putting the problem-solving before the problem makes the potential applications for such devices practically limitless.

Free from the constraints of explicitly programmed function, computers could gather together disparate information, weigh it based on experience, form memory independently and arguably begin to solve problems in a way that has so far been the preserve of what we call “thinking”.

“It’s an interesting effort, and modelling computers after the human brain is promising,” says Christian Keysers, director of the neuroimaging centre at University Medical Centre Groningen. However, he warns that the funding so far is likely to be inadequate for such an large-scale project.

That the effort requires the expertise of such a variety of disciplines means that the project is unprecedented in its scope, and Dr Modha admits that the goals are more than ambitious.

“We are going not just for a homerun, but for a homerun with the bases loaded,” he says.

Full article: BBC