Chris Woolley

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@afneil Aaah, the good old days!

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@wallaceme The gannet is probably the only one being completely truthful about their campaign

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@johnredwood Balance of payments crisis approaching.

[LMD (Arc.) @Layemie001]

Pool chlorine on an old fence. Who knew?

[Terrible Maps @TerribleMaps]

Blows my mind how much earth has shrunk in just 54 years. Concerning

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Visualization of the distances in astronomy https://t.co/Yu1RO3mCPE

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@NoContextHumans Just need to find some petrol.

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@FraserNelson you are too young to remember the British churches closed under covid then?

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@NoContextHumans What do you mean they’ve fallen over?

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@NeilDotObrien And as the price rockets, the government gets more VAT by the bucketload.

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@wallaceme It was the way he smiled and handled it in such a kind way rather than getting cross. That resonated with everyone. Golden moment.

[Helen Day @LBFlyawayhome]

St David's Day
Dydd Gŵyl Dewi

Artist: H Woolley (1954)

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@ScareyClaire2 @NigelNelson @LeoKearse @claire_pearsall How do you know they voted differently?

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@theAliceRoberts Thank you for your expertise and enthusiasm. Look forward to your new work. Good luck.

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@imagic @thorneh Not just periglacial. Happens on our back lawn in wet winters.

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@thorneh @ClerkofOxford You can’t beat a good bit of solifluction.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@JohnRentoul He’s got glasses?

[Chris Woolley @Bumpaman]

@wallaceme If you like that sort of thing.

[Out of Context Human Race @NoContextHumans]

They did it. They made the perfect month.