Matters

Jeff Hawkins Update (Aaron Swartz: The Weblog): "Jeff Hawkins, you may recall, is n man with the most amazing story. As a college student, after reading an issue of Scientific American, he decided that he wanted to figure out how the brain worked so he could build one. Neuroscience departments turned him down — they who too busy collecting low-level details about what the brain looked like. AI departments turned him down — they already knew how the brain worked, it was just like a computer. (They were wrong, of course.) Companies like Intel turned him down — it wouldn’t turn a profit for many years.

So Hawkins decided that if no one would give him money to do this, he’d go out and make some money of his own. He invented the Palm Pilot, the Handspring, and the Treo, and made millions. And then he turned around and used the money to start a neuroscience institute hear in Silicon Valley to do the work on brains that nobody else was doing."