Today was the first day of the 2006 Almaden Institute. The past three years’ Institutes were very interesting, and two of them were even related to my work, so I was looking forward to this year’s edition. The topic is “Cognitive Computing”, and knowing that pretty much exhausted my level of knowledge going in to the first session.

There’s nothing like starting a conference out with a speaker who tells good jokes — and when he’s also a Nobel Prize winner, that’s a bonus. Gerald Edelman‘s talk, From Brain Dynamics to Consciousness: A Prelude to the Future of Brain-Based Devices, was heavy going at times (I had to go diving in Wikipedia to discover what terms like “qualia” meant), but I enjoyed those parts which I understood (which definitely included the jokes).

I didn’t expect to understand much of Henry Markram‘s talk, The Emergence of Intelligence in the Neocortical Microcircuit, but it turned out to be fairly accessible, and loaded with good graphics. His group is trying to simulate networks of about 10,000 neurons, with some early success — they need a BlueGene to do it, though.

I missed about half of the first post-lunch talk, Robert Hecht-Nielsen‘s The Mechanism of Thought, but came in during the discussion of confabulation as a mechanism to generate grammatically correct and plausible sentences. I think it’s a long way from that to Chancellor, though, and so did much of the audience — Hecht-Nielsen claims that it’s possible in the near future, with no major breakthroughs required (at least that’s how I interpreted him).

The second post-lunch talk was from Jeff Hawkins on Hierarchical Temporal Memory: Theory and Implementation, based on the work he describes in On Intelligence. It seemed plausible to me, but I do have a high order of ignorance in this area.

I skipped most of the panel discussion in favor of getting a little work done, but returned to the conference in time for the “moderate” walk to the water tower (I needed some exercise today), and then a tasty dinner and a very interesting talk by Rama on The Uniqueness of the Human Brain, which covered phantom limbs, synesthesia, and the emergence of language. His talk was far better than the typical after-dinner talk at a conference; I’m glad I stayed for it (I did, however, leave before dessert was served).

The Institute continues tomorrow, but I’ll probably only sample it instead of staying for the entire day. My inbox needs attention.

Some time ago, Diane got a nice pen as part of a Thanks! award at work:

There wasn’t anything particularly special about the pen, but it felt nice in the hand and wrote well. For a while. But it ran dry awfully quickly, so I disassembled it this morning and found that it had a teeny tiny refill, about two inches long (the pen is five inches long).

The obvious plan was to visit the local office supply store and get a refill — but they didn’t have anything which fit. So then it was time for Plan B: Google.

But it was not obvious what I should search for. Since the refill said “Ministar E”, I Googled for that, but I didn’t find anything useful (many spam pages, though). Ditto on “Ministar pen”, “Ministar refill”, and “Ministar pen refill”.

Then I turned the refill over, and found intriguing markings.

It looked like an ISO standard number, ISO 12757-2, so I Googled that, and found Dark Matter, which told me that ISO 12757-2 is the standard governing archival ballpoint pen ink. And that there was a related standard, 12757-1, which described the dimensions of refills.

A little more searching took me to the ANSI Store, where I could buy the standards: $53 for part 1 and a mere $40 for part 2.

I passed, although I did ask the librarian at work if we happened to have those standards — we didn’t.

So then I followed a sponsored link to the Colorado Pen Company, which offers many, many refills — and pictures, too. There are two which look similar to mine, one for Alfred Dunhill pens, and one for Lamy pens. The Lamy refill even has the magic phrase “ISO 12757-2” on it. But it costs five bucks, plus shipping, which seems like a lot to pay for one refill (though it is a full 4-1/4 inches long).

So I may do something entirely different. While I was chasing down the standard, I stumbled across this Digg, pointing to these instructions on using Mont Blanc refills in inexpensive Pilot G2 pens. Our local office store is having a sale this week — eight Pilot G2 pens (plus two bonus pens or pencils) for $6; they’ve got the Mont Blanc refills at two for $12. So for just a little more than I’d pay for one refill plus shipping, I could have what purports to be the world’s best writing pen. Hmmm….