Links for 4 Oct 2005

Three interesting sites from the PHI conference that didn't make it into yesterday's writeup:

• RealAge, an online service that quizzes you about diet, exercise and other health habits, and tells you whether you're older or younger than you ought to be.
• DNA Direct, an interesting personalized health service that, for a fee, produces a DNA sequence for an individual and scans it for specific marker genes related to particular diseases like breast cancer and others.
• The Body Journal, a tool for managing personal health information for you and your family. Keeps track of illnesses and treatments for different people, and allows you to publish data to a secure site for access by your doctor or other caregiver.

My summer lake reading this year was Jeff Hawkins' book On Intelligence. This will probably be the best book I read this year when December winds down. I learned today that Hawkins' research institution, the Redwood Neurosciences Institute, has moved from the Peninsula to UC Berkeley (Go Bears!). I hope to make it to a few of the seminars. Hawkins also has a venture-backed private company working on the theories he espouses in his book; that's Numenta.

I've not gone crazy about Sudoku the way that some of my friends have, but I think the puzzles are interesting and a lot of fun. They're a sneaky way to teach logic to kids; they look like simple number games, but it's really not about the numbers at all. Robert Woodhead has published Sudoku Susser. It's a useful tool for learning the technique of solving puzzles, and a good cheat if you're stumped by a tough one.